Ethical Hermeneutics Engaging Individual-based Instrumental Reason: Lessons for Leaders in the Modern Social Imaginary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An ethical hermeneutics is both of practical benefit for institutional leaders and an important response to what Charles Taylor describes as the “modern social imaginary,” or how people imagine their social existence and its underlying assumptions, which he argues is currently grounded in instrumental reason practiced by individuals, but without shared moral and evidentiary frameworks. Using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, supplemented by ethical philosophers including Charles Taylor, Jeffrey Stout, and Emmanuel Levinas, the article considers the political and social issues raised by the modern social imaginary, especially in the United States, and shows how the consequences of individual-based instrumental reason can be productively engaged by a broadly conceived ethical hermeneutics. This approach provides both (1) a way to think within and engage the historicity of the current moment and (2) practical hermeneutic solutions to problems of communication and understanding faced by leaders, with examples from the author’s experience in academic leadership.
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 | 0.029 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".