Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given his important contributions to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, David Armstrong could be content to merely rehearse these views -or even ride off in the philosophical sunset -his status as a major late twentieth century philosopher secure.Instead he remains active and intellectually engaged, continually rethinking and revising his earlier positions in light of the current literature.And, as a result, one way of viewing Truth and Truthmakers is as a snapshot of Armstrong's evolving philosophical picture.But in addition, it is an attempt to systematize this picture by embedding it within Truthmaking theory.Not only do we get an account of his current metaphysical views regarding properties, modality, mathematical entities, causation, and the like, we also get an argument that these views meet the desiderata of Truthmaking theory -yielding appropriate truthmakers for the corresponding truths.The framework within which Armstrong attempts to embed his specific metaphysical views -Truthmaking theory -is both familiar and confounding.It is familiar because the truthmaking relation just is the correspondence relation of the old correspondence theory of truth, and truthmakers are just those features of reality to which the truths correspond -traditionally, 'the facts ' (Armstrong 2004, p. 16).It is confounding because Truthmaking theory presupposes both a realist metaphysic and the correspondence theory of truth: the 'powerful concept' (p.xi) of a truthmaker comes into play only after most of the heavy lifting has already been done.Armstrong does suggest that Truthmaking theory does provide an 'interesting' (p.20) test of specific metaphysical theories and an 'illuminating and useful' (p.23) regimentation of the broader metaphysical enterprise, but neither suggestion confers a particularly compelling motivation upon it.
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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 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.074 | 0.025 |
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".