On Constructing a Parody and Then Knocking It Down: A Reaction to Kerr and Blais
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kerr and Blais’ (2000) paper is frequently ambiguous, incoherent, and severely misrepresents the work of Bouffard, Strean and Davis (1998). Kerr and Blais have committed the logical fallacy of attacking a straw man, which is to misrepresent an opponent’s argument presumably for the purpose of making its attack easier. Although they indicate their desire to proceed without reference to ontological and epistemological assumptions, they implicitly submit the contentious statement that eclecticism is a philosophy that has been accepted by movement skill acquisition researchers. They also endorse eclecticism as a philosophy. In this reaction, I question the validity of numerous statements made by Kerr and Blais and elaborate on some points we made in 1998. I conclude that Kerr and Blais’ paper is a parody of Bouffard, Strean and Davis’ work, which is unlikely to advance our understanding, and submit that the study of research assumptions is an essential part of genuine inquiry.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".