Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many observers have been fascinated by the puzzle of tracing connections between Noam Chomsky’s extraordinary contributions to two quite distinct domains of modern culture. Ronald Lunsford points out that some of these parallels would exist whatever area of inquiry Chomsky had chosen for his life’s work - parallels that “arise from Chomsky’s way of thinking, rather than from the disciplines themselves” (Haley & Lunsford; 1994: 172). One critical element in his “way of thinking” manifest in both his professional and non-professional work is his commitment to rationality (a commitment summed up in the observation, “There are no arguments that I know of for irrationality” [Chomsky 1987a:22]). On a more abstract level, one finds in both his political and his non-political work a quality that Chomsky has sometimes referred to as “psychic distance.” In linguistics, “if we can establish a kind of psychic distance from the object and try to see how similar normal common characteristics really are, against the background of a possible variety that can be imagined,” we discover that “language structures really are uniform” (1988a: 151f). In politics, once we have extricated ourselves from conventional thought, we discover underlying similarities between apparent polarities - an underlying commitment to US power shared by, for example, Joseph Alsop (a Vietnam War “hawk”), and Arthur Schlesinger (a Kennedy liberal and a “dove”). The ability to achieve “psychic distance ” is actually an essential element of the ability to inquire, and to achieve scientific progress.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".