Bibliographic record
Abstract
Having finished his doctorate in two years, W. V. O. Quine made a beeline for Vienna. This was 1932, and the object of his visit, Rudolf Carnap, had already gone on to Prague. After a few months of attending Moritz Schlick's lectures and meetings of the Vienna Circle, Quine too went on to Prague. He was not to return to Vienna for over 35 years, not, in fact, until he delivered “Epistemology Naturalized” (Quine 1969) as a lecture there in 1968. In the meantime Quine acquired, and indeed cultivated, a reputation for rejecting, some would say refuting, everything that was central to the new Viennese philosophy. Here I want to challenge that picture. Quine did arrive in Vienna in 1932, but intellectually at least he never left. Quine tended to identify the Vienna Circle with Carnap. The Vienna that I am talking about is broader and more heterogeneous. Quine is rarely seen as a historian, but his historical picture of the Circle and of Carnap has been enormously influential, and his historical writing plays a crucial role in his argument for his nonhistorical views. Second, Quine's own views have direct Viennese antecedents, or if not, the arguments for them do. And finally, the views for which Quine was most famous were modified over the years, specifically in Carnap's direction. In short, Vienna remained the city of Quine's dreams; it was the home of his concerns, the source of his arguments, and the lodestar of his aspirations. VIENNA What I mean by “Vienna” of course is the Vienna Circle. And this is a broad and varied tradition. Naturally, the city has other long-standing and distinguished philosophical traditions. Generally, those traditions seem to have been of an empiricist sort, Aristotelian and sometimes Thomist. That is not surprising, given the redominance of Catholicism. Brentano and his school were well established in Vienna (and in Poland), and I say that despite Brentano’s having been born in Germany, leaving the priesthood, and spending most of his time in Vienna as privatdocent rather than as professor. But if we take Viennese philosophy so broadly as to include the whole Aristotelian tradition, then the idea that Quine fits somewhere in such a wide spectrum would hardly be worth considering.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
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".