Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I will first try to refute Lesher’s hypothesis who reads in 18.1 a polemical reference to divination: in the first verse, in fact, Xenophanes merely outlines an exemplum fictum, punctually overturned in 18.2. The fragment must be read, on the contrary, against the historical background that produced it. The language of Xenophanes in B18 is the same as ever and many are the interconnections with the remaining evidences. Here it is enough to recall the link with the two surviving elegies, in which the value of intellectuals is proudly claimed, as opposed to that of the athletes hailed by the masses. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that in B18 the researchers (ζητοῦντες) are celebrated, with a genuine ‘monument’ to what was being discovered at Miletus. I will also try to show how previous interpretations have been vitiated by an unfair devaluation of Xenophanes’ ‘scientific’ activity, seen as a pre-Herodotean ἱστορίη, not as an investigation referring to a methodology that was taking shape and in which Xenophanes largely recognised himself. B18, therefore, is not the first affirmation of coherent ‘philosophical’ interpretation, but the first, brilliant intuition of what enquiry was revealing, in opposition to the mythical tradition, in a passage from μῦθος to λόγος that was gradual, rich in nuances, but irreversible.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.085 | 0.031 |
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".