Revision, Analogy, and the “Problem of Reality” in Michael Frayn’s <i>Copenhagen</i> and <i>Human Touch</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Published eight years after the premiere of Copenhagen, his celebrated play about atomic physics, Michael Frayn’s Human Touch (2006) reflects on the epistemological and phenomenological implications of human experience, syntax, and quantum mechanics. Summarily, Frayn posits that reality’s fundamental indeterminacy makes thought, language, identity, culture, and experience possible at all. The book echoes more than Copenhagen’s themes, however, and the pair’s structural similarities invite readers to rethink Copenhagen as a piece of philosophical theatre. The play foregrounds the process of drafting and redrafting, and it stands as a draft of the ideas in the book that soon followed. The book follows suit as it drafts and redrafts its central question through its prodigious length. In conversation with Human Touch, we can read Copenhagen as an exploration of our ability to forge connections between otherwise disparate features of reality (including quantum mechanics). More crucially, Copenhagen demonstrates the pivotal role that theatre plays in the indeterminate epistemology that Frayn espouses in Human Touch. In doing so, Copenhagen embodies an earlier draft of the epistemology Frayn later explicates in the book. In other words, Copenhagen represents a rare example of a thinker working through philosophical ideas on stage before committing them to an argument.
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 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".