Getting real about nominalism again: Special forum introduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Nominalism, while significantly affecting the history and development of modern western thought since the fourteenth century, has unfortunately been neglected in much recent social theory. In this article, we offer an introduction to this Special Forum on nominalism to help redress this circumstance. In addition to this introductory piece, the Forum consists of three articles respectively covering: questions of nominalism, relativism and universalism in relation to Enlightenment debates over China; tensions over nominalist and realist theoretical visualities in Durkheim and Weber; and a critique of nominalist sensibilities in the sociology of finance combined with the articulation of a novel sociologically realist alternative. Specifically, in this piece, we contextualize the emergence of nominalism, adumbrating how it affects a variety of metatheoretical judgments, especially concerning the nature of social reality and what can possibly be known about it. Michel Foucault’s nominalism and Ian Hacking’s conception of ‘dynamic nominalism’ are also discussed. Finally, it invites critical realists to consider how commitments to humanism might implicate them in nominalism.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.005 |
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".