What’s Alternative about Alternative Rationality in CAS-E’s Definition of ‘Esotericism’?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The guiding proposal for the ‘Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective’ project ( CAS-E ) offers both a particular definition of ‘esotericism’ and an approach to the process of definition itself. This commentary first briefly compares this definition and approach to our parallel definitional work. The CAS-E definition begins by taking “contemporary scientific and technological discourse as a global foil.” This leads to a definition based on four criteria: (i) esotericisms aim “to identify and influence present and future life events”; (ii) they “assume special knowledge”; (iii) they emphasis “forms of (ritual) efficacy”; and (iv) they are “alternative rationalities,” that are “contested and precarious” in relation to dominant discourses, especially natural science. We raise critical questions about this fourth definitional criterion, calling for further clarification, and suggesting that it might be usefully framed as a meta-criterion that holds the others together.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it