Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the topic of ageism through the lens provided by Simone de Beauvoir concerning the subjective “unrealizability” of age. In her book, Old Age, she adopted the terminology of existentialism to argue that old age was one of the “unrealizables”: phenomena that can be grasped only through their “otherness.” Old age, in her view, can only ever be understood as an object position, or rather a multiplicity of object positions, none of which aligns with the experiencing self. This inherent otherness of age provides a ready template for viewing agedness as an undesired, undesirable, and fundamentally alien characteristic. The outwardly ageing subject’s view of him- or herself remains always ageless, distinct from such otherness, experienced as more real than any self-reflected aged other. But while age’s unrealizability may sustain the individual’s subject position as ageless, it risks perpetuating the devaluation of the aged as always a collective other. Rather than demanding a resolution of such object and subject positions, I suggest that a more realizable goal may be to accept this inevitable opposition and focus instead upon improving the objective conditions of later life. Enriching the actual relations of care might constitute such an objectively “realizable” goal, one that is also in keeping with the social intent of de Beauvoir’s book.
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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".