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Record W2207593219 · doi:10.5325/preternature.4.2.0181

Superstition, Testimony, and the Eighteenth-Century Vampire Debates

2015· article· en· W2207593219 on OpenAlexaff
Kathryn Morris

Bibliographic record

VenuePreternature Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGothic Literature and Media Analysis
Canadian institutionsUniversity of King's College
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVampireSuperstitionSkepticismDilemmaHistoryPsychoanalysisNatural (archaeology)PsychologyLiteratureEpistemologyPhilosophyArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT In the late seventeenth century, reports of vampire attacks began to emerge out of eastern Europe. These stories became the focus of a scholarly debate that centered on whether the events described in the vampire reports could possibly be true and, if so, how they ought to be explained. The reports presented a dilemma: although the events they described were implausible, the reports were often supported by testimony from reliable sources. This article will explore two eighteenth-century interventions in the vampire debate, and consider how they responded to this tension. Augustin Calmet carefully documented and examined the vampire reports, using established natural philosophical models for the study of strange phenomena. Despite Calmet's rational methods and skeptical conclusions, his work on vampires was vociferously attacked by Voltaire. I will argue that the encounter between Calmet and Voltaire illustrates their different ways of understanding the relationship among superstition, knowledge-production, and testimony.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.810
Threshold uncertainty score0.848

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.314
Teacher spread0.254 · 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 teacher head, 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

Citations2
Published2015
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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