Paulin Hountondji and the Science Question in Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book offers a systematic reconstruction of Paulin Hountondji’s contributions to the debate about the place of modern science on the African continent. The book shows that Hountondji develops an account of modern science that is sociologically sensitive to the entanglement between modern science and colonialism on the African continent without falling into epistemic relativism about the claims of modern science. It is argued that Hountondji’s views on modern science express a strong historical materialist influence, and that he develops a theory of science that draws both on the Hessen-Grossmann hypothesis and dependency theory. Thus, this book brings together two strands of historical materialist thought about science that have hitherto been isolated from one another. This book is of interest to scholars who specialize in African philosophy, history and philosophy of science, global philosophy, and African studies.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
How this classification was reachedexpand
The three-model screen
all 5,600 screened works →All three models called this metaresearch. It is in the settled core of the field.
Philosophy/STS book reconstructing Hountondji's account of modern science in Africa, its entanglement with colonialism and the social organization of scientific knowledge; science as a social system is the object.
The book examines modern science as a social and historical system in relation to colonialism.
Philosophy/STS reconstruction of Hountondji on modern science, colonialism, and science in Africa.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".