The Myth of Progress? Critical Theory and the Debate Over Progress
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
Philosophy as a discipline has generally claimed that human beings have a capacity called practical reason that allows us to address moral-practical questions. Applied to historical change, this yields an account of progress as a process of rationalization. The 20th century has produced a long line of radical critiques of this idea of progress. My central aim is to defend contemporary critical theory’s reliance on the idea of progress as an emancipatory process of rationalization. Because she engages deeply and directly with the accounts of progress I seek to defend, my focus is on Amy Allen’s critique and an array of closely allied recent criticism. I address Allen’s two general objections to progress as a fact, one political and the other epistemological. Against contemporary critical theory, I maintain, neither objection gains traction, since no truly emancipatory project can succeed once the idea of progress has been abandoned, both as a goal and a fact about our past.
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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| 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 | 0.007 |
| 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