A Return to ‘the Inner’ in Social Theory: Archer’s ‘Internal Conversation’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Like psychology, sociology is often infused with the idea of transforming itself into a genuine science by redesigning itself to conform to a generic model of what scientific explanation is supposedly like. In recent sociology and social psychology, a ‘realist’ understanding of science has provided a prominent platform for promoting the renewal of scientific ambitions in the ‘behavioural sciences’. As usual, the promised science does not soon materialize; its development is postponed until the problems involved in setting out how the proper form of scientific explanation actually works are sorted out. These conceptual problems involve not only issues about the nature of explanation, but also those found in philosophical psychology in relation to how conduct is to be brought within the explanatory scheme: how are the relations between ‘the inner’ and ‘the outer’, the ‘private’ and ‘the public’ to be encompassed within the scheme? These questions enter, no less awkwardly into sociological as they do into psychological deliberation, often in contexts bounded by the perceived opposition between mentalism and behaviourism, on the one hand, and between determinism and autonomy on the other. In sociology, one setting for these difficulties is the perennial controversy over the proportional contributions to behavioural outcomes made by ‘structure’ (the influence of pre-existing conditions) and ‘agency’ (individual spontaneity), where there are two (at least) contested inclinations involved in attempts to foreclose the difficulties: one, to doubt that individual decisions genuinely fix outcomes, and, two, to assume a ‘behaviourist’ conception of the mind as an exhaustively public phenomenon. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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 | 0.028 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.122 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.044 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".