Colloquium 3 Likely and Necessary: The Poetics of Aristotle and the Problem of Literary Leeway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Taking as a starting point a crucial passage of Aristotle’s Poetics where poetical technique is declared to be different from all other disciplines in human knowledge (25, 1460b8–15), I try to determine in what sense and up to what point poetry can be seen as an autonomous or sui generis creative activity. On this path, I come across the so-called “likely and necessary” rule mentioned many times in Aristotle’s essay, which might be seen as a limitation of the poet’s literary freedom. I then endeavour to show that this rule of consistency does not preclude the many means by which the poet can astonish his or her audience, bring them into error, introduce exaggerations and embellishments on the one hand (and viciousness and repulsiveness on the other), have the characters change their conduct along the way, etc. For Aristotle, the poetic art—and artistic activities in general—is concerned not with what in fact is or what should be (especially ethically), but simply with what might be. Accordingly, one can see him as historically the very first theorist fiction, not only because he states that poetry relates freely to the possible, but also because he explains why poetry is justified in doing so.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".