Social policy and idealist versus non-idealist thought: the fundamental schism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: the late Victorian and Edwardian idealists ‘British Idealism’ had, as a philosophical movement, a fairly short preeminence at Oxford and universities in Scotland – broadly from about the 1880s to the First World War. Key figures include T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and D.G. Ritchie. Attacks on the meaning of its utterances came from G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later from A.J. Ayer (for a concise discussion see Passmore, 1968). However, if idealism was soon in retreat in philosophical circles, it maintained a cultural hegemony elsewhere, especially in the many areas of social thinking in which philosophers seldom participated. In Boucher's view, exponents of idealist thought, in demonstrating the relevance of philosophy to ordinary life, ‘exercised a considerable influence in providing a frame of reference for social policy, public administration and education reform well into the twentieth century’ (1997, p xi). Harris argues that this influence is particularly marked in social policy (1989, and 1992, pp 135-7). Social work's debt to idealist thought is also interesting in, for example, Canada. Moffatt and Irving (2002) have shown how John Watson and George Blewett, both students of Edward Caird at Oxford, influenced the development of social work in an idealist direction, particularly at the University of Toronto. This was reinforced with the arrival of the idealist E.J. Urwick from London in 1924: as first head of the department of social science and administration at the London School of Economics he had specified ‘social philosophy’ as the central discipline (Harris, 1992, p 125). Harris’ definition of idealist thought is usefully broader than the Idealist philosophical perspective at its core, and refers not just to philosophers who self-consciously adhered to the idealist school, but to anyone who thought that knowledge rested on certain a priori categories, who viewed society and/or the state as having a real corporate identity, and who saw the prime concerns of social science as being the interpretation of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ rather than the discovery of causal laws. (Harris, 1992, p 123) Only some idealist philosophical positions are of concern here, related to its distinctive social, political and moral tenets.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".