Replicating Reasons: Arguments, Memes, and the Cognitive Environment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Some arguments that are delivered in a dialectical exchange are never again recalled. Others are repeated again and again across argumentative situations and settle in a community's shared cognitive environment, thus demonstrating a memetic quality along lines that have become popular with several cultural theorists as a way of describing the evolution of culture. Moreover, some arguments may themselves act as memes. If memes “are replicators and tend to increase in number whenever they have the chance” (Blackmore 1999, 37), then they should be of interest to rhetoricians and argumentation theorists. I explore the relationship between arguments and memes, considering the nature of the meme and its argumentative potential. While controversial, meme theory promises to shed new light on how persuasion works in our mutual cognitive environments, and the attention it gives to how reasons move from mind to mind encourages the effort of the exploration.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 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 it