Transcendental Inquiry and the Belief in Body: Comments on Rocknak's Imagined Causes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The title of Stefanie Rocknak's book—Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects—neatly and concisely captures the book's central claim: Hume holds that thinking about objects is a matter of imagining the causes of our perceptions. Rocknak argues that in giving an account of how we think about objects, Hume is engaged in a transcendental project. My comments focus fairly narrowly on this central thesis, which unfortunately means that I have set aside a great deal of interesting material in the book, including Rocknak's provocative and challenging interpretations of Hume's views about the nature of mental representation, time, and justification. I propose to focus on three related issues: First, I consider the sense in which, on Rocknak's view, Hume is engaged in a kind of transcendental project, and raise some questions about how to understand Rocknak's view about this project. Second, I want to raise some questions about how to understand the claim that conceiving of objects, for Hume, is a matter of imagining causes. Finally, I will look more closely at some of the evidence that Rocknak appeals to in support of this interpretation, and suggest that the interpretation faces two challenges. I invite Rocknak to say more about these challenges in her reply.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.022 |
| 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".