Philosophy as a Mediating Institution and the Problem of Tradition in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article turns to the question of tradition that emerges from the relation to one’s transmitted practices and to the practices others hope to transmit and use. To overcome the conflicts that arise in the context of a variety of recourses to diverse traditions, it draws on Fernand Dumont’s concept of “mediating institutions” and his reflection on philosophy as referring to a tradition of radical self-questioning. Dumont developed his ideas in response to great social changes within Québécois society brought by industrialization and the separation of religion from everyday life. However, his approach to the problem of social cohesion, which continues to be pursued by recent Québécois (and Canadian) governments, did not address the presence of a variety of traditions. To take into account the hegemonic processes at play in the protection and legislation of culture, this article also draws on Himani Bannerji’s critique of tradition and of official multiculturalism. By creating a dialogue between Dumont and Bannerji—two sociologists who also understand themselves to be philosophers and who think at a distance from the Canadian nation-building project—it addresses the question of non-hegemonic mediations between sets of traditions, and seeks to develop a critical conception of tradition.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".