Four Temporalities: Toward a Typology of Narrative Forms
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
I outline four temporalities that appear in highly regarded explanatory historical social science. Given William Sewell’s centrality to the literature, I do so through a critique of his proposition that there are “three temporalities”—experimental time, teleology, and eventfulness—and that only the last of them is valid. I concede that his rejection of “experimental” time is justified. But I argue that the category of “teleology,” which Sewell rejects, encompasses two forms of transitional change—“tendencies” and “thresholds”—that are coherent and defensible. I further argue that his preferred category of “eventfulness” really refers to two distinct temporalities—“coincidences” and “contrivances”—rather than just one. I illustrate tendencies, thresholds, coincidences, and contrivances in the works of John Veugelers, Ivan Ermakoff, Marshall Sahlins, and, of course, Sewell.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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