Critical Notice of Alan Tapper and T. Brian Mooney, Eds. Meaning and Morality: Essays on the Philosophy of Julius Kovesi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The book discussed in this Critical Notice is a volume of essays about the work of the late Julius Kovesi. Kovesi’s best known work is Moral Notions (Routledge 1967). MN aimed to disrupt the prevailing orthodoxy of 1950s and ‘60s meta-ethics by such claims as: “[M]oral notions do not evaluate the world of description… Moral notions describe the world of evaluation” (MN, 161). The core of Kovesi’s meta-ethical view is a more general theory of concepts of any kind. The essays in the volume discussed cover this broad approach as well as its specific application to moral concepts. The essays are all by scholars sympathetic to Kovesi’s work who feel that work has not received the recognition it deserves – a point of view with which I myself wholly agree. In the Critical Notice, I first summarize the essays, and then consider in more detail two recurrent themes in the volume. The first is the extent to which Kovesi can be held to regard moral concepts as functional concepts [sort of, but definitely not in the way several authors imply]. The second concerns Kovesi’s antipathy to Wittgenstein’s doctrine of family resemblances, a stance approved by several authors, in my view mistakenly so.
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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.005 |
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".