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A Primer on the Distinction between Justification and Excuse

2009· article· en· W2092059399 on OpenAlexaff
Andrew Botterell

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophy Compass · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicWar, Ethics, and Justification
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsExcuseSkepticismEpistemologyPhilosophyInternalism and externalismPhilosophy of scienceLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This article is about the distinction between justification and excuse, a distinction which, while familiar, remains controversial. My discussion focuses on three questions. First, what is the distinction? Second, why is it important? And third, what are some areas of inquiry in which the distinction might be philosophically fruitful? I suggest that the distinction has practical and theoretical consequences, and is therefore worth taking seriously; I highlight two philosophical issues in which the distinction might play a useful role; but I express skepticism about the prospects for drawing a firm distinction between justification and excuse.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.009
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.009
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.050

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0090.009
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0040.003
Science and technology studies0.0040.027
Scholarly communication0.0090.015
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0080.014
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.161
GPT teacher head0.279
Teacher spread0.118 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations60
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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