Pragmatic Epistemology and the Importance of Descriptive Representation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our Canadian legislature and democratic governments around the world are haunted by the history of oppression, discrimination, and marginalization of minority groups that still suffer, politically and socially, the material effects of those injustices.Most of these governments have extended the franchise universally, and according to dominant liberal democratic theory, all citizens should have equal access to the political institutions that govern their lives by way of the principle of one--person--one--vote.Yet, the discrepancy between the proportion of members in a distinct (often marginalized) group within the population and the proportion of members of that group acting as representatives in parliament is empirically evident.It is argued that this absence is problematic, for symbolic as well as functional and moral reasons 1 .This is a problem of political representation.When I first submitted my proposal for this project, I was working on my undergraduate thesis.In that paper, I was defending a conception of descriptive representation on four grounds: symbolic value, its propensity to encourage deliberation, the improvement of the relationship between governing bodies and minority groups, and the insight or experiential knowledge that descriptive representatives offer.I had initially proposed using Richard Rorty's pragmatic epistemology to elucidate exactly what it meant for experiential knowledge to change the outcome of political deliberation.But, as I was reading Rorty's various works on pragmatism and cultural politics, I found that pragmatic epistemology offers us -us being 1 For more in--depth discussions of these problems, see
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".