<i>Meaning, Truth, and the Limits of Analysis: Ten Studies</i>, by David Wiggins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are few finalities in philosophy. No one sees this as sharply as David Wiggins, who is always refining and improving his views. Here he has revised and resubmitted for our attention ten important papers on meaning, truth, and analysis. They made their first appearances between 1980 and 2007 and in the list of sources, Wiggins thanks the initial publishers for their permission ‘to draw upon’ those earlier efforts. In this latest iteration, Wiggins has not merely tinkered with his papers, making them better, but has sometimes reached different conclusions. Anyone wanting to know his most considered positions on meaning, truth, and analysis will need to carefully study this new volume. In addition to the meticulous revisions, the reader is provided with long abstracts for each chapter, which serve not only to summarize, but to indicate how Wiggins’s thoughts hang together. There is a particular approach animating Wiggins’s work on meaning and truth. It is advertised in the title of the volume—a resistance to the method of analysis that so captured the attention of Moore, Russell, and subsequent generations of analytic philosophers. But isn’t Wiggins, one might well ask, an analytic philosopher himself, paying attention and respect to logic, Frege, Tarski, Davidson, and so on? Of course he is and this is what makes his rejection of the method of analysis especially interesting. It is an argument against analysis from within, an argument which will leave intact much of what the analytic philosopher holds dear.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".