Professional skepticism through audit praxis: An Aristotelian perspective
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While professional skepticism (PS) is a critical element of audit practice, academic and professional discourse offers unclear and sometimes competing narratives of how to maintain or improve it. This study provides a holistic account of how PS develops by interpreting interviews of 21 highly experienced auditors. Using a theoretical framework from Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre, PS is interpreted as a character virtue of skepticism guided by the intellectual virtue of phrónēsis. PS is developed through two distinct stages of auditors' careers: (i) the pre‐professional phase, in which an auditor acquires characteristics amenable to developing PS; and (ii) the professional praxis phase, in which PS is inculcated through a combination of formal and on‐the‐job instruction and audit experience. This approach to how PS is developed suggests that audit firms could focus more explicitly on recruiting novice auditors whose pre‐professional characteristics make them receptive to acquiring PS, and on blended learning, with formal and on‐the job instruction and habituation through audit experience.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it