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Record W4415689906 · doi:10.1111/phpr.70072

Lady Parts and Baby Parts: What Is a Fetus?

2025· article· en· W4415689906 on OpenAlexaff
Alexandria Boyle

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicReproductive Health and Technologies
Canadian institutionsCentre for Global Health Research
Fundersnot available
KeywordsOrganismMetaphysicsFetusPhilosophy of mindPregnancy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT A common‐sense view of mammalian pregnancy treats the fetus as (a) an organism and (b) co‐extensive with the approximately baby‐shaped entity developing in the uterus. In this paper, I draw on metabolic accounts of the organism to show that (a) and (b) cannot both be correct: either the fetus is not an organism, or it is considerably more extensive than we tend to think, overlapping considerably—perhaps completely—with its mother. Although other accounts of organisms may have different consequences, I argue that they are all likely to put pressure on the idea that the fetus is a roughly baby‐shaped organism. I show that this has consequences for understanding the metaphysics of birth, our nature and persistence, and the ethical dynamics of pregnancy.

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 score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.013

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0030.025
Scholarly communication0.0040.005
Open science0.0000.003
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.209
GPT teacher head0.441
Teacher spread0.233 · 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

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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