Taking Pluralism and Liberalism Seriously: The Need to Re-understand Faith, Beliefs, Religion, and Diversity in the Public Sphere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How we understand the nature of the public sphere and the fact that all citizens are believers and have faith (but not necessarily religious beliefs and faith) is important to treating all beliefs (including religion) fairly in the public sphere. This article argues for a re-understanding of foundational (but often unexamined) ideas such as “secular” and “secularism”, “faith,” “beliefs,” “diversity” and “liberalism.” It argues that an atheistic or agnostic dominance of the public sphere is unfair and, when the principles are understood properly, unconstitutional. The article examines the law and recent cases in South Africa and Canada against a backdrop of each country’s constitutional provisions, as well as recent philosophical arguments, to suggest that key terms and phrases such as the “separation of church and state” and the relationship between religion and equality need to be re-understood in order for pluralism and liberalism to be properly related to human freedom (understood in its personal and communitarian dimensions) and to be properly protected and encouraged by law and politics.
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 | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.127 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".