The Nineteenth Century in Ruins: A Genealogy of French Historical Epistemology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the historical and philosophical background of the French tradition of historical epistemology. As a sort of ‘historical epistemology of historical epistemology,’ it traces some of the forces, incidents, and events that made possible (and perhaps even necessary) the emergence of a new way of doing epistemology in the first half of the twentieth century in France. Three developments that occupy a position privilege in this narrative are: (i) the collapse of German idealism, (ii) the birth of French positivism, and (iii) what the author calls ‘the crisis in the theory of science’ that swept over Europe in the early 1900s. These developments suggest that the emergence and development of historical epistemology was the effect of changes internal to the history of Western philosophy (from Kant to Comte) as much as a function of changes external to this history (including changes in the material fabric of society).
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".