The Epistemological Aspects in the Historical Works of Don Bates; For Don, from one unremitting Kuhnian to another
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The object of this paper is to systematize an epistemological framework of analysis derived from Don Bates's extended essay "Medicine and The Soul of Science," and apply that framework to a number of problems connected to medical knowledge, addressed in previous research by the author. The paper also draws from Bates's earlier work, especially the two-part "Closing the Circle" on William Harvey and the reception of his ideas by his contemporaries, and from contrasting and comparing it to the work of philosophers and historians of science who tackled similar problems, most notably Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, and Ian Hacking. The resulting framework is based on three main concepts: constructed coherencing, the unproblematic background knowledge (UBK), and the mechanical mind. The paper closes with an application of that framework to the discussion of knowledge in medicine and the definition of diseases.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".