Review of Peter Carravetta, The Elusive Hermes: Method, Discourse, Interpreting. Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group Publishers, 2012. 486 pages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Before I dive into the details of this short reportage, there is certainly one thing that cannot be denied: Peter Carravetta, by publishing The Elusive Hermes: Method, Discourse, Interpreting, shows an uncommon and rare amount of ambition.This book is indeed the first element of a tetralogy that presents itself as an interpretation of what the author calls⎯rightly or not⎯'postmodern culture'.The project will also touch upon multiple themes and questions including contemporary Italian culture, "the meaning of humanism, the emergence of European hegemony, and the idea of a perfect society from Dante to Marx" (xvii).A heavy and ambitious program indeed.A program that will need, to find its proper expression, to rely on a vertiginous erudition⎯an erudition definitely possessed by the author.This ambition and this erudition commands the admiration of the reader, and his/her attention.The first volume here plays a double role: it presents itself firstly as the theoretical ground on which will rest the interpretation of the postmodern culture that will be articulated in the following volumes; it also plays the role of a prism through which the main ambition of the author is dispersed and decomposed in an ensemble of smaller, programmatic ambitions.One.The author wants to fill a void that exists⎯according to him⎯in the philosophical literature on hermeneutics: philosophers and hermeneutists in particular have not been sensitive enough to the methodological dimension of all interpretative acts (5).Even Gadamer, in his opus Truth and Method, beyond a few remarks on our modern conception of method and the deep affinities that it shares with the natural sciences (3), offers no indication as to what would be a proper methodology for interpretation.Hence, for the author, "hermeneutics…ought to rethink the problem of method and its relevance to all aspects of comprehension and the determination of knowledge, scientific or not" (3).Two. Considering the links that tie the modern concept of method to the practice of the natural sciences, and even for the more or less successful attempts to import this concept into the fields of the humanities, the author
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.018 |
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".