Mutual engagement as methodology: Joseph Carens and the ‘Toronto School’ of Political Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Political theory and political philosophy are marked by a wide variety of approaches, which can be grouped broadly into normative/prescriptive, historical, and critical traditions of political thought. These are not just distinct in terms of scholarly focus, but also in methods, standards for evaluation, informal networks, conferences, and journals. Many scholars spend their graduate school years and much of their careers largely engaged in one or another of these fields, leading to a fractionalization of political theory. This contribution offers a conceptual framework for better understanding their interrelated nature, seeing these distinct fields as part of a common project of political theorizing. We call this framework ‘The Toronto School,’ named after a class Carens taught for graduate students at the University of Toronto. The Toronto School is less a particular method for doing political theory (the way, say, Skinner or Foucault offers) and more an ecumenical understanding of political theory as a discipline, which sees the various approaches and aims of our field as having unique and complementing competencies and blindspots that fit into a more general project of intellectual inquiry. This contribution articulates the broad contours of the Toronto School, with a particular eye toward the way it reconciles normative, historical, and critical approaches.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".