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Record W3199574036 · doi:10.1111/socf.12767

Have Schemas Been Good To Think With?*

2021· article· en· W3199574036 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueSociological Forum · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSocial and Cultural Dynamics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsConflationSociologyEpistemologyPopularitySchema (genetic algorithms)Sociology of cultureSocial scienceSocial psychologyPsychologyComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Schemas are one of the most popular explanatory concepts in cultural sociology and are increasingly used in sociology more broadly. In this article, we ask the question: have schemas been good to think with? We answer this question by analyzing the ontological, epistemic, and methodological bases of schemas, including the conceptualizations, claims, assumptions, and methods that underpin the use of schemas in sociological inquiry. We show that sociologists have developed two distinct, contradictory, and often conflated perspectives on schemas, what we refer to as culturalist and cognitivist perspectives. We suggest that schemas have acquired a polysemic character in sociology, and that they have become a (more narrow and consequently more scientifically legitimate) proxy for Culture, and that these features have (paradoxically) facilitated the popularity of schemas within the discipline. Sociologists have recently begun to make the necessary advancements to turn schemas into a more useful explanatory concept, through both analytical improvements (by distinguishing schemas from both public culture and other forms of nondeclarative personal culture), and methodological innovations (for better deriving schemas from survey data, texts, and experiments). Yet, some challenges remain, and the analytical value of schemas remains promissory. We conclude by offering some guidelines for making more specific and measured claims about schemas in sociological research.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.772
Threshold uncertainty score0.728

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.035
GPT teacher head0.322
Teacher spread0.287 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it