Pyrrhonian Scepticism in Thomas Elyot's<i>Defence of Good Women</i>(1540)
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article discusses the first known mention of Pyrrhonian Scepticism in the English language, which occurs in Thomas Elyot’s 1540 Defence of Good Women. The article inquires into the sources of Elyot’s knowledge of Pyrrhonism and into his motivations for mentioning Pyrrhonists in a text on the social and political status of women. I conclude that, on the balance of evidence, the most likely source of Elyot’s ideas on Pyrrhonism is Galen’s De Temperamentis. Furthermore, I argue that the rejection of a straw man version of Pyrrhonism serves as a tool of authorial positioning for Elyot, and in particular as a means of reassuring his reader that the Defence is not intended ironically. Elyot chooses Pyrrhonism as a philosophical position representing bad faith arguments, and he likely does so because of the hostile treatment of Pyrrhonism in Galen’s works, and especially in De Temperamentis.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
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 it