Political theory in context, normativity without frontiers: thinking along with Joseph Carens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers an overview of the development of Joseph Carens’s political thought and serves as the introduction to a special issue devoted to his scholarly work. It begins by offering an account of the ethos that we see engaging Carens’s work over his illustrious career. We underscore how his approach to normative problems is acutely informed by questions of context and feasibility, while resisting the impulse to accept existing conditions as defining the limits of justice. The account we offer points us toward Carens’s theoretical development as a figure in political theory, addressing four key themes that have animated Carens’s work, which in turn inform the contributions that span this special issue. These include the ethics of immigration, the question of membership and community, egalitarian political economy, and the place of methodology in political theory. To do so, the article provides a brief overview of each of these areas, Carens’s key contributions to advancing our understanding of these themes, and the essays in this special issue that bear on them.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".