Bibliographic record
Abstract
C.I. Lewis never completed his final project on ethics. There are a few short papers published based on lectures that he has given in the 1950s, and a vast amount of draft materials that he was working on up until the time of his death in 1964. But his ultimate life project, the final book on ethics, never came to fruition. From the materials available, it seems that even towards the end of his life, Lewis was still adjusting and refining his view on how to answer the question “What is right?” That said, it is clear that the core arguments remain consistent throughout his works and draft manuscripts. The main goal of this paper is to reconstruct from the available materials the overall ethical framework Lewis was working towards; and to present the key arguments that lie at the heart of his ethical theory. In doing so, I will also attempt to show that Lewis’s pragmatic conception of the a priori developed in the 1920s actually plays a critical role in grounding his entire ethical view. This paper concludes with a brief evaluation of how well the argument based on a pragmatic a priori fares against the moral skeptic.
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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".