Bibliographic record
Abstract
Genuine modal realism (GMR) holds that whatever is possibile is the case at some possible world and that possible worlds are maximal mereological sums of things that are spatiotemporally interrelated. Metaphysical nihilism (MN) holds that there is a world empty of concrete entities. GMR and MN contradict. A particularly strong argument for MN is the substraction argument (SA). This paper examines to what extent this argument poses a threat to GMR and by which means GMR can possibily be defended. I will lay out two basic strategies to do this and show that both of them face severe problems. Nevertheless, I will point to a prima facie possible way to defend GMR, namely by adopting a claim recently made by E. J. Lowe (2002): some abstract entities exist necessarily and concrete entities are a necessary condition for their existence.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".