Bibliographic record
Abstract
George BraguesToday, however, it is widely held that no objective framework exists to decide normative and factual judgments.All such judgments are said to reflect the political, cultural, and socio-economic imperatives of the particular time and place in which they are made.This view has been christened postmodernism, which Jean Francois Lyotard has defined as an "incredulity to metanarratives," that is, "any science that legitimates itself with reference ... to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth."^With postmodernism, the original Enlightenment legitimation of liberal democracy as the regime that best accords with reason is reduced to a mere cultural prejudice.We need not dwell on the debatable claim that the rise of postmodernism constitutes a crisis of the West and that, once it makes its way into everyday opinion, it threatens to sap the loyalty of the public towards liberal democracy.Political and moral theorists wanting to make sense of postmodernism would find more profit in considering whether it requires us to revise the nature of our personal allegiance to liberal democracy.Does postmodernism entail that we view liberal democratic institutions as something to which we should, at best, resign ourselves or, more positively, as something to which we can be wholeheartedly committed?The writings of Richard Rorty, regarded by many as America's leading philosopher, offer a promising medium to explore this question.Rorty's answer ends up falling somewhere between the opposing poles of sullen acquiescence and passionate devotion, though much closer to the latter than the former.In defending democracy, Rorty does not-like Jurgen Habermas,^ for example-try to resurrect Enlightenment ideals of objectivity.Nor does Rorty, as is the case among various conservative thinkers, suggest we tap into pre-modern traditions, such as Judeo-Christianity or classical political philosophy, to provide objective fortification for the Enlightenment's leaky foundations.^What makes Rorty intriguing
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 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 | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".