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Record W4414269168 · doi:10.30965/26664275-bja10132

Sextus Empiricus on the True and the Lekton

2025· article· en· W4414269168 on OpenAlexaff
James Allen

Bibliographic record

VenueHistory of philosophy & logical analysis · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicClassical Philosophy and Thought
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContext (archaeology)Object (grammar)Section (typography)Meaning (existential)Argument (complex analysis)Period (music)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Apart from the section of book VII that Diogenes Laertius dedicates to Stoic logic, Sextus Empiricus’ treatment of the true, Adversus Mathematicos VIII 1–140, is the most extensive and important repository of testimonies about the Stoics’ theory of the lekton or sayable that has come down to us. Unlike Diogenes Laertius’, Sextus’ treatment is highly polemical. Fragments of Stoic theory are embedded in a context adapted to the needs of Pyrrhonian scepticism. To serve these purposes, Sextus imposes a framework on the views that he tackles which classifies them in terms of the questions he takes to be in dispute. The object of this essay is to assess Sextus’ performance as an expositor and critic of the Stoic theory. It argues that Sextus’ account was assembled out of originally separate and sometimes disparate pieces, and it detects a number of mis-matches between Sextus’ framework and his arguments, on the one hand, and the material to which they are applied, on the other. It concludes by recommending that readers approach Sextus’ evidence with caution.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.026

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.022
Scholarly communication0.0050.004
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0010.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.054
GPT teacher head0.226
Teacher spread0.172 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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