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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".