Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), maxims—pithy statements of general truth—convey individual confusion rather than collective wisdom. I will illuminate the experimental function of maxims in Swift’s fiction by turning to his interest in the philosophy and sententiousness of Francis Bacon. Bacon pioneered a form of aphoristic writing that was designed to help empiricists access nature by avoiding psychological pitfalls. Swift, attuned to psycho logical pitfalls and sceptical of a person’s ability to avoid them, made innovative sententiousness a feature of his two longest fictional satires, works long considered important to the novel’s emergence. This essay argues that Swift’s maxims create effects of inwardness in his fictions, in large part by operating as satires on empiricist methods. In response to Bacon, Swift uses maxims to figure consciousness as “knowledge broken”—failures of private thought made public to humble readers. This essay rehistoricizes the early novel by demonstrating the importance of Baconian sententiousness and epistemology to eighteenth-century fictional explorations of interiority.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".