Techno-Science, Integral Thought, and the Reality of Limits in Laudato Si’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Reality" is a term that appears dozens of times in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. The term is not directly defined, but appears to signal for Francis a mysterious, relational, created order that imposes limits on humans while also evoking positive feelings like wonder and peace. Francis contrasts this vision of reality with perspectives on the world that are human-centered, fragmented, or reductionist. In this way, his account of reality grounds his sharp critique of narrow, techno-scientific perspectives on life and the world that entail a will to mastery and control. Francis’s critique of reductive, fragmentary perspectives is also connected to his concern with a category of humans and nonhuman others whom Francis designates “the excluded” in Laudato Si’. Distorted views of reality perpetuate neglect of these excluded others and prevent us from grasping the integral functioning of human, ecological, and social realms. I conclude by contrasting Francis’s version of integral ecology with other forms of integral thought that express naïve enthusiasm for technology, and suggest a denial of human and natural limits.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".