Bibliographic record
Abstract
A recent trend in Russell scholarship has been towards the thesis that, contrary to his own recollections, Bertrand Russell really didn’t need the 1905 theory of descriptions to deflate an excessive ontology, because (1) there was no excessive ontology in The Principles of Mathematics, at least not one with golden mountains and the like, and so (2) Russell’s real motive, at least his main one, was not ontological but rather was to replace the incoherent sense-reference distinction on which the old theory of denoting depended. I want to gently dispute that thesis by showing that Russell’s old theory in Principles was ambivalent on ontic commitment to non-existent things and it could not give an adequate account of the central problem which Russell faced before “On Denoting”, viz. our apparent discourse—including our ability to make true and false propositions— about non-existent things. I also show briefly how the new theory solves the old problem.
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 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 | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".