Dialectics to the rescue: Critical insights into Africa’s (under)development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
That dialectics, as a mode of reasoning, is routinely used to explain the worlds of both nature and society per their inherent complexities, contradictions, and states of flux makes it quite amenable to robust theorizations of development. However, since many are those who see Africa(ns) in simplistic and wholly pessimistic terms, it is unsurprising that there is a conspicuous dearth of dialectical analysis of Africa’s development challenges and prospects. This paper examines Africa’s development from the standpoint of dialectics, showing how the key tenets and concepts of dialectics—including negation, sublation, the transformation of quantity to quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the interchangeability of causes and effects—could help us understand the trajectory and dynamics of Africa’s development. The paper conceptualizes development as a dialectical process and, consequently, sees efforts in development discourse to set Africa (or any other part of the world, for that matter) in strict binary opposition to another region as unsustainable.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.070 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".