Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter addresses a source of resistance to rationalist accounts that often goes unnoticed: what we call the allure of illusory explanations. We illustrate how this allure affected much twentieth-century philosophy, and how it continues to have an impact today, before turning to a detailed case study involving one of the most influential ideas about conceptual development in empiricist thought—its reliance on a process of abstraction. Locke held that abstraction explains the origins of all general representation. We show that it can’t, and that the failure to see this is because of the allure of illusory explanations. In addition, we step back from the main line of argument in Part IV to consider what a revised account of the process of abstraction might look like. We show that such a process isn’t uniquely suited to empiricist theorizing; it’s fully compatible with different types of rationalist approaches as well.
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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".