The Scientific Method, Modernism, and Postmodernism Revisited: A Response to Bouffard (2001)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper offers a brief response to the article of Bouffard (2001), which in itself was a reaction to two earlier papers published by the present author (Shephard, 1998, 1999). Bouffard makes a vigorous attack on his perceptions of my observations concerning the use of jargon, the primacy of the scientific method, and postmodernism. Unfortunately, his perceptions of my arguments are not always substantiated by a careful reading of the text. Many of the world’s social ills are rashly attributed uniquely to rationalism. No viable alternatives to the scientific method are suggested, and self-criticism of the postmodern approach is less than optimal. Nevertheless, the paper is to be welcomed, both as a challenge to continuing perfection of evidence-based science and as providing an insight into the thinking of those who espouse the postmodernist philosophy.
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 | 0.048 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.048 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".