Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ever since the possibility of atheism, or at least the denial of providence, appeared on the philosophical scene in ancient Greece, the option was available that though religion (natural or revealed) is absurd or immoral or both, it may be used mendaciously as social glue; as the best – possibly in some circumstances the only – way to ensure harmony within a political community. It can be usefully employed by bad rulers as well as good. Plato’s uncle Critias claimed that gods were ‘invented’ by a clever despot so as to act as all-seeing thought-police who would promote his own advantage. In the Republic (459cd) Plato himself is prepared to lie and deceive in the interests of the state, though insistent that lying in matters of religion is intolerable. And in the Laws (2.663d) he notes that if the wise lawgiver cannot demonstrate that the just life is more pleasant than the unjust, he would yet have to claim, for the public good, that it is. Of course, Plato himself was convinced that no right-thinking metaphysician would fail to prove the requisite philosophical point, so the need for social glue would only be relevant in a religiously- and metaphysically-cleansed society. Which society in its turn, were it to be a logically viable option, would depend on a very unplatonic account of human nature and capacity.
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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".