Conceptual Dynamite: An Argument for Thoughtful Language in Conceptual Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Given the rising trend of politicizing formerly mundane topics, philosophers should guard against the concepts we develop being misunderstood or misconstrued to support arguments we never intended. To demonstrate my assertion, I develop the case study of Alex Kacelnik's notion of “biological rationality” (B-rationality) and show ways in which I believe it is vulnerable to misuse and ways I would suggest re-engineering it to be more resistant. I conclude by urging scholars — especially those working on normatively laden topics — to design our concepts such that they are less likely to become associated with harmful discourse or even oppressive policies.
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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 | 0.056 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.117 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".