The Viewpoint of Posterity: The Age of Discoveries Seen through the 17th and 18th Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the nineteenth century, it was not unusual to consider the idea of the “Great Geographical Discoveries” as a phenomenon confined to the “century of discoveries”, pioneered by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, which was universally accepted as the starting point of a new turn in the history of the world. The aim of this article is to prove that in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the chronological definition of the “Great Geographical Discoveries” and the importance given to those discoveries were varied and depended on the political strategies of governments. After the last quarter of the sixteenth century, discoveries were no longer considered as responsible for significant progress in knowledge, a sharp contrast to what they had represented in the first half of that century. During the second half of the seventeenth century, they were seen as full of mistakes and erroneous certainties of which geography had to free itself by systematic exploration and the use of observational astronomy: it was that corrective process which was considered by its protagonists as the real era of the Great Geographical Discoveries.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 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".