Data, Models, Theory and Reality: The Structure of Demographic Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of demographic theory has been hampered by the widespread adherence — not always self-conscious — to the methodological doctrines of logical empiricism. According to this view, theory arises from empirical generalizations, and can be rejected if empirical exceptions or counter-examples are brought forward. An alternative view of theory sees it as an imaginative construction in response to data, a construction that is true by definition, but not a true description of the real world. As an abstraction it necessarily misrepresents the concrete world. The question is whether a theory is close enough to some part of the real world in certain respects to serve some well-defined purpose. Examples of this alternative view are found in the ‘semantic’ school of philosophy of science, but also in the work of some leading demographers and a few other social scientists. When seen from this alternate perspective, demography actually has more and better theory than is commonly thought. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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 | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".