What a Little Bird Tells Us About Symbolic Thought: the Russet-Capped Stubtail ( <i>Tesia everetti</i> ) in Nage Augury, Myth, and Metaphor
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among symbolic representations of animals, birds appear to play a disproportionately large part. This paper explores the symbolism of a particular bird, the Russet-capped Stubtail (Tesia everetti), among the Nage of eastern Indonesia. The stubtail features in several contexts of Nage augury, myth, and metaphor but, in each instance, it stands in opposition to another bird category (or, more specifically, “folk-generic”). I also show how different symbolic contexts, in which the stubtail occurs, reflect different physical and behavioral features of this bird. Although the focus is a single small bird, the paper reviews and discusses several features of symbolic thought in general, giving attention especially to the ways symbolic knowledge of animals is mentally constructed differently from knowledge that informs folk taxonomies.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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