In Defense of Knowing, In Defense of Doubting: Cicero Engages Totalizing Skepticism, Sensate Materialism, and Pragmatist Realism in "Academica"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whereas contemporary scholars in the social sciences and humanities often envision themselves as exceptionally, if not uniquely, attentive to the problematics of human knowing and acting, the competing philosophies of totalizing skepticism, sensate materialism, divine worldviews, and pragmatist realism have a much more enduring presence in Western social thought. Plato (c420-348BCE) introduces a broad array of philosophic standpoints (theological, idealist, skepticist, materialist, and pragmatist) in his texts and Aristotle (c384-322BCE) addresses human knowing and acting in more distinctively secular, pluralist terms. Still, more scholarly considerations of human knowing and acting would be comparatively neglected by Cicero’s time and even more so after his era. Although much overlooked by those in the human sciences, Cicero’s Academica re-engages a number of highly consequential issues pertaining to the matter of human knowing and acting. Likewise, whereas Christian theologians often were hostile to heathen (relativist, materialist, pragmatist) philosophic viewpoints, important residues of these approaches would remain part of the Western intellectual tradition though Augustine’s (c354- 430 BCE) works. Academica is centered on the historically sustained skepticist emphases of Plato’s Academy (c350-50CE) but Cicero’s text also attends to some competing viewpoints that developed along the way. In addition to (1) acknowledging some of the intellectual shifts in Plato’s Academy over three centuries, this statement also (2) provides a pragmatist critique of the totalizing skepticism of the Academicians, and (3) illustrates the ways in which Cicero, as a representative and defender of Academician skepticism, deals with critiques pertaining to the problem of human knowing and acting. Thus, whereas Cicero is best known as a rhetorician and his text is presented as an instance of rhetorical interchange, Cicero’s Academica also may be seen as “a defense of knowing” and “a defense of doubting,” two of the most central features of scholarship.
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 | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".