Conflit des apparences et recherche du vrai : les principes épistémologiques du scepticisme de Sextus Empiricus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How can skepticism be reconciled with the preservation of appearances? Either skepticism denies appearances thereby making itself impossible to formulate or to live by; or the preservation of appearances leads to some dogmatism that denies skepticism. The first chapter of this thesis shows that Sextus Empiricus treats conflicting appearances as the fundamental problem of philosophy: appearances are what we must judge to be true or false. The second chapter explains how, in his texts, philosophies denying that appearances could lead to truth —such as nihilism, relativism or intellectualism— are refuted by self-reversal and the fact that appearances are the first things to be known. Conversely, the third chapter follows Sextus's demonstration that defending the truth-value of appearances —either by a philosophy of common sense, or through a reduction to private affections, or even in a more refined manner as in Epicurian sensualism— also leads to a dead-end. Moreover, the fourth chapter demonstrates that, according to him, the intermediate way, which makes a distinction between true and false appearances, is impossible too, firstly because of the aporias caused by the dualism of sensation and thought, secondly because we are unable to distinguish between conflicting appearances, and thirdly because of the relativity of circumstances in which we apprehend things. The last chapter concludes from Sextus that skepticism is the necessary consequence of the epistemological principles admitted by every philosopher and that by preventing thought from attributing truth to appearances; it leads to a strictly practical criterion, thereby dissolving the conflict between appearances.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".