Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gomes' The Practical Self is a rich and ambitious exploration of the connection between self-consciousness and objectivity. The argument of the book is this. As self-conscious creatures, we are required to have faith in ourselves as agents of our thinking. Our faith in ourselves as agents of our thinking is sustained by our participation in a practice—our practice of holding each other accountable for our attitudes. To participate in such a practice, we have to be connected to other persons, and therefore to an objective world. So, as self-conscious creatures, we are connected to an objective world. In this paper, I will be concerned with the first premise of this argument. For Gomes, an agent is required to have faith in a proposition p just in case (i) the proposition p is theoretically undecidable but (ii) the agent is practically required to assent to it. I will question Gomes’ claim that the proposition that we are agents of our thinking is theoretically undecidable. And I will express scepticism—from a different direction—about his claim that we are practically required to assent to the existence of a self that serves as an agent of thinking.
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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".