The system and its logic (I): from positive philosophy to social science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The two Comtes Any attempt to think through the coherence (or non-coherence) of Comte's work as a whole is faced with a difficulty that has attended its reception from the outset. The world religion he aimed to found, and whose Grand-prêtre he proclaimed himself to be, was never more than a marginal sect. The Positivist catechism, calendar, liturgy, sacraments etc. are of interest today only as an example of the kind of ideological exotica that flourished in the radical period that culminated, politically, in the upheavals of 1848. At the same time, Comte's entire oeuvre consisted of tracts designed to establish the intellectual basis of that religion, to train its clergy, or to evangelise on its behalf. To take Comte seriously, then, has always required some strategy for separating what Durkheim and others called ‘the absurdities’ into which Comte's religious mission led him from those aspects of his work (conventionally, his philosophy of science, and the methodological relections under-pinning his premature founding of sociology) deemed to have a more enduring intellectual relevance. Among the eccentricities which found their way into his texts, and which, outside the coterie of true believers, have particularly held him up to ridicule, were a numerology (which dubbed the first three cardinal numerals sacred, held the number seven, and generally all primes, in high regard, and provided classficatory principles for his profusion of systems and tableaux générales ) and an extreme version of the Romantic culte de la Femme . Comte's gynolatry was combined, moreover, with an almost parodic puritanism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".