Dissenting Heads and Hearts: Joseph Priestley, Anna Barbauld, and Conflicting Attitudes towards Devotion within Rational Dissent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anna Barbauld's and Joseph Priestley's disagreement on the subject of devotion was famously characterised by James Martineau as “passion for the sublime and the beautiful” confronting “passion for the truth.” Such a characterisation, however, is potentially misleading because it suggests that Barbauld lacked “passion for the truth.” At least partly, the disagreement between Barbauld and Priestley stems from a fundamentally different assessment of the limits of human knowledge (an assessment that in both cases is closely connected to a commitment to the search for truth and the associated principle of “free inquiry”). Inadvertently, Martineau not only distorts Barbauld's position within Rational Dissenting thought but also obscures a crucial split among Rational Dissenters in their approach to the search for truth.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".