On Embedded Normativity - An Active Inference account of agency beyond flesh
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We introduce and motivate the concept of \emph{embedded normativity} to account for the externalization of social norms in the material environment through human social activity. We ground this notion in the Active Inference framework, and more specifically through the derived Skilled Intentionality framework of ecological perception and action. This framework considers that skilled agent experience the world as a landscape of affordances, or opportunities for action. This landscape is inherently normative, as its experience is tied to the agent's anticipations over its own behaviour (and therefore, indirectly, to its motivations). We emphasize that given this framework, normativity does not exist inside or outside the agent's boundaries, but is brought about by its engagement with the world. We discuss the dynamics of \emph{internalization} and \emph{externalization} by which agents come to project normativity onto elements of their environment, and experience this normativity as a simple attraction toward favoured states. Given this account, we revisit earlier descriptions of the shared material and sociocultural niche enable the broadcasting and integration of norms. Finally, we discuss how embedded normativity can be brought into existence by the perception of humans, and relate our discussion to the ontological stance of participatory realism.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it