Commentary on Alex Barber, “Concepts, Conceptions and Conceptual Change”. Technical Report 2001-01
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of Barber’s paper is to suggest that developmental psychologists who \nare committed to the popular theory-theory of conceptual content should adopt a new \nvariant known as entrenchment theory, that will be immune to some of the philosophical \nchallenges that plague the theory-theory. \nThe theory-theory of concepts says that a mental representation expresses some \nconcept when: a) that mental representation occurs in a well-defined set of stored \npropositions (beliefs), and b) this set of stored propositions are, as Barber puts it, \n“characteristic” of the concept. (p. 2) The unrestricted conception-conception says that \nevery single belief a person has that involves some representation is relevant in \ndetermining which concept that representation expresses. So the theory-theory is a \nrestriction of the conception-conception because it identifies a subset of core beliefs \ninvolving a representation R, namely the theoretical ones (whatever that may mean), and \nclaims that only these theoretical beliefs, and not any others, determine the identity of the \nconcept expressed by R. \nEntrenchment theory also places a restriction on which beliefs are relevant to the \ncontent of a representation, but it does so in a way that is different in two respects. First, \nand most importantly, rather than determining whether a belief is part of a theory, we use the level of entrenchment of the representation in the belief to determine whether it is \ncentral or not. Second, while the theory-theory encourages us to make a binary distinction \nbetween beliefs that do or do not bear on the identity of a concept, entrenchment (I \nbelieve) necessarily makes a fuzzy distinction. Those beliefs in which a representation R \nis more entrenched have a stronger bearing on the identity of the concept expressed by R. \nThose beliefs in which R is less entrenched have a weaker bearing. \nR is more entrenched in belief A than belief B if giving up or revising belief A \nwould be more epistemically traumatic than giving up or revising belief B. Giving up a \nbelief will be more epistemically traumatic the more far reaching the implications for \nevidence are. Barber remarks that, at least for natural kind concepts, demonstrative and \nlinguistic beliefs will tend to be more entrenched than beliefs about theoretical origin or \nstructure. This pattern may be reversed for more purely theoretical concepts. (p. 14)
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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 | 0.010 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.030 | 0.033 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.020 |
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".