Adventure in the social world: Georg Simmel’s appeal to a theory of creative action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reconstructing the logic of everyday action between reproduction and invention of forms is a growing concern in contemporary debates on the praxeological foundation of sociology. This article argues for a renewed understanding of action in its contingency and creativity. Building on current developments on the role of projectivity and imagination in the emergence of the new and unexpected in action, it turns to Simmel’s undervalued essay “The Adventure” to examine a style of conduct characterized by deviation from predicable patterns and background assumptions in everyday life. To understand the emergent properties and intrinsic complexity of creative action, one must consider the philosophical discoveries of Simmel concerning the form of adventure in the subjective flow of time. The adventure is elaborated as an action involving curiosity, unfamiliar detours, and a sense of presentness as striking features that benefit insights from his later work on life’s transcendence.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".