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Record W4255242656 · doi:10.1080/00330120902931952

Strategic Positivism∗

2009· article· en· W4255242656 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Professional Geographer · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicHistorical Geography and Geographical Thought
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPositivismPoliticsSkepticismSociologyOpposition (politics)EpistemologyIdeologyMainstreamPolitical scienceLawPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Since the early 1970s, critical theorists in geography and other social sciences have worked to build what Steinmetz (2005) Steinmetz, G. 2005. The politics of method in the human sciences, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] calls a "pluralistic postpositivist counterworld." Postpositivist intellectual currents emerged in the shadow of, and in opposition to, mainstream science at a time when positivist epistemology, quantitative methodology, and conservative political ideology seemed always to go hand in hand. This neat alignment was contingent and contextual, but every postpositivist movement committed to progressive or radical politics has portrayed the nexus as essential and immutable. Over time this caricature has been reinforced and reproduced, as strident postpositivists and defensive spatial scientists pursue ever more sophisticated, challenging specializations that make it harder to bridge the binaries of our field. In this article, I suggest that the presumed linkages between epistemology, methodology, and politics were never fundamental or immutable—and that recent years have brought significant realignments. Right-wing political operatives have coopted many of the epistemologies and methods traditionally associated with the postpositivist academic left. A new generation of progressive, critical geographers is doing first-rate work—like that appearing in this Focus Section—that is revitalizing the scientific rigor, policy relevance, and political power of the left. I analyze how this movement of strategic positivism is an integral (but single) element of a pluralist geography that mobilizes trust and deference to synthesize individual specialization and collective goals to build emancipatory geographies.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.829
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.003
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.026
GPT teacher head0.323
Teacher spread0.298 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it