Attribution arguments and the metaphysics of immanent actions: cognitive acts from Peter John Olivi to Durand of St. Pourçain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I survey one of the key arguments used in Latin medieval psychology in favour of active views of cognition, from Peter John Olivi to Durand of St. Pourҁain. In broad terms, these ‘attribution arguments’, based on some appeal to other causal events or how we speak of them, argue that passive views of cognition have the absurd consequence that they misattribute our cognitive acts to things ultimately external to our intrinsic cognitive powers (viz., external objects or sensible/intelligible species). In the secondary literature, these arguments tend to get overshadowed by arguments with more distinctly Augustinian roots, based on the nobility of cognition or the experience of active attention. However, in this paper I argue that these ‘attribution arguments’ are distinctly interesting, especially insofar as they speak to hot debates concerning so-called ‘immanent acts’ and how to read Aristotle on such actions in Metaphysics Θ.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".