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Record W3088464012

Photomicrography and the Problem of Scientific Realism

2019· article· en· W3088464012 on OpenAlexaff
Karl-Magnus Gustav Brose

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicScience Education and Perceptions
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsObjectivity (philosophy)EpistemologyObject (grammar)SociologyRealismRelation (database)Sociology of scientific knowledgeInterpretation (philosophy)PhilosophyAestheticsComputer science
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, prominent bacteriologist Robert Koch played a major role in reforming and codifying the practice of scientific photomicrography. Concerned with the various epistemic functions of photography as a medium for the illustration of scientific texts, Koch helped establish a set of shared standards to be followed by the emerging professional class of scientists studying the cell structure of bacteria. Koch rejected the unproblematic claims of objectivity, a non-interventionist model of objectivity which privileged the camera for its apparent lack of subjective distortion. The desire for mechanical objectivity is connected to changing conceptions of the image's relation to the text in the seventeenth-century, during which the emergence of empirical science upended the subservience of images to a discursive model, insisting rather that the object itself be represented without the subjective interpretive act of an artist or writer. Koch's argument for the standardization of photographic procedures represents a new approach to scientific illustrations by fixing the act of viewing through the photographic eye, which establishes a common and institutionalized basis for interpretation and the critique of the individual scientist's abilities. The sociological ramifactions of this development are considered with respect to the debate between scientific realists and social constructivists, motivating the adoption of a middle path between these two opposing epistemic poles.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.017
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.024
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.991
Threshold uncertainty score0.091

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0170.024
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.001
Science and technology studies0.0090.092
Scholarly communication0.0100.016
Open science0.0020.008
Research integrity0.0070.013
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.022
GPT teacher head0.329
Teacher spread0.307 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2019
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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