Bibliographic record
Abstract
ArgumentumOrnithologicum.Iclosemyeyesandseeaflockofbirds.Thevisionlastsasecond,orperhapsless;IamnotsurehowmanybirdsIsaw.Wasthenumberofbirdsdefiniteorindefinite?TheprobleminvolvestheexistenceofGod.IfGodexists,thenumberisdefinite,becauseGodknowshowmany birds I saw. If God does not exist, then the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In thiscaseIsawfewerthantenbirds(letussay)andmorethanone,butdidnotseenine,eight,seven,six, five,four,threeortwobirds.Isawanumberbetweentenandone,whichwasnotnine,eight,seven,six, five, etc. That integer—not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc.—is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists. –Jorge Luis Borges (1960/1999, p. 299) More than 2 decades have passed since Geoffrey Saxe’s first visit to Papua New Guinea, when he began his inquiry into the highly idiosyncratic counting system of Oksapmin’s people. As evidenced by his account, a quarter of a century is a period long enough to make historical shifts visible.Thepointofdepartureforthiscommentaryon“CognitioninFlux”—orCiF,forshort—isthat what is true about the discourse under investigation may also be true about the discourse of the investigator: Over the years, the researcher’s talk might have undergone noticeable transformation as well. Because the recursive exercise of researching the discourse of research may be an experiencenotanylessinstructivethanfollowingchangesinindigenousOksapminarithmetic,Idecided to devote my critical appraisal of Saxe’s 25-year-old project to the analysis of shifts in his uses of thekeyworddevelopment.Indoingthis,IwillbefollowingtheexampleofSaxe’sownstudy,presented in this issue, in which he epitomized the development of Oksapmin numerical thinking in thestoryofasingleword—fu.Inthefollowing,whileconductingthishistoricalinquiry,ItrytoansweraquestionnotunliketheoneSaxeandEsmondehaveaskedwithrespecttoOksapminnumerical discourse: How do changes in the ways of talking result from, and impinge on, what people ask, do, and notice? 1 TheomnipresenceofthewordsdevelopmentanddevelopmentalinSaxe’swritingindicateshis adherence to the well-established line of research, the roots of which go many decades back, and which is strongly associated with the work of both Piaget and Vygotsky. The long tradition has madethekeynotionsofthedevelopmentalresearchseemsoself-evidentthatalmostnouserbothers to define them explicitly. (I challenge the reader to find an operative definition of the term de
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.117 | 0.028 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".