MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2523063276 · doi:10.31581/jbs-17.1-4.4(2007)

Reflections on Infallibility

2007· article· en· W2523063276 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
William Hatcher

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Bahá’í Studies · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedieval and Classical Philosophy
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsInfallibilityFanaticismEpistemologyIdeologyRationalityHumanityPhilosophyPoliticsLawPolitical scienceTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The historical claim to possess infallible authority has often been associated with ideological dogmatism and/or attempts to buttress political power on behalf of a certain thought system. In modern times, the notion of infallibility has been regarded with suspicion, and viewed as antithetical to rational inquiry, which by its very nature acknowledges its limitations and relativity. This paper advances the following theses: (1) The degree of social and intellectual progress exhibited in human history would have been impossible without the existence of periodic external truth referents (i.e., points of infallible authority). (2) Far from being antithetical to reason, true infallibility is the main source of rationality in history, consistently preventing humanity from losing itself totally in superstition and fanaticism. (3) The positive contribution to history of infallible sources of authority (e.g., the Manifestations of God) does not depend on general recognition of their infallibility. (4) Infallibility (freedom from error) is often confounded with omniscience, thereby undermining our understanding of the different grades of conferred infallibility. (5) Religious dogmatism and fanaticism do not result from the Prophet’s claim to infallibility (“what my Prophet says is true”) but rather from the exclusivist ideological claim made by the Prophet’s followers (“nothing else but what my Prophet says is true”).

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.008
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.020
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.079

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0080.020
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0080.074
Scholarly communication0.0120.019
Open science0.0020.006
Research integrity0.0090.016
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0110.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.280
GPT teacher head0.414
Teacher spread0.133 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2007
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueThe Journal of Bahá’í StudiesSame topicMedieval and Classical PhilosophyFrench-language works237,207