The ontology of personhood and a realist critique of the policy discourse based on skills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses the critical realist concept of human reflexivity to develop a theoretical critique of the notion of ‘skills’ in current policy discourses, particularly in vocational education. We argue that current policy reifies skills as market commodities and alienates them from the minds, bodies, and hands of those who exercise them and the social contexts in which they are deployed. This is traced to historical ideas of a liberal market society, resulting in an impoverished view of human beings and human agency. The skills discourse presumes people’s reasons to value things they care about arise from possessive individualist preferences and external conditioning of atomistic social and material utility. In contrast, we suggest real people act on reasons they value to learn things and practice their skills or not, which resonates with the ontology of personhood, the intrinsic worth of human beings, and a rounded notion of human agency.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.135 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".