Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter provides a brief history of the rise and persistence of mechanism from the seventeenth century up to the present day. Beginning with the rise of modern science and the shift from the Aristotelian understanding of nature to the Galilean one, the essential determinacies of mechanism are explicitly elaborated by Descartes in his notion of res extensa. The initial mechanistic model, extended to animal life through crude analogies with clocks, wheels, and pulleys, gave way to more subtle and nuanced forms, ultimately finding its way into biological conceptions that are claimed to have gone beyond mechanism. This, I argue, is due to a failure to explicitly conceive of and criticize mechanistic determinacy in its own right. Instead, the latter is uncritically taken up as a pregiven conceptual resource found readily available within the cultural lexicon after the seventeenth century and then employed to frame various phenomena. Thus mechanistic determinacy persists as a conceptual frame in spite of disdain for crude seventeenth-century analogies. This indicates the need for an explicit critique of mechanistic determinacy per se, above and beyond merely replacing or supplementing it with different conceptions. The dialectical account of mechanism and life provided in Hegel’s Science of Logic satisfies this need, and does so in such a way that the relation between mechanism and life is clarified.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".