Contemporary scepticism and the cartesian God
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although Descartes presents himself as an adversary of skepticism, in contemporary epistemology he is celebrated much more for his presentation of the skeptical problem than for his efforts to solve it.The Cartesian skepticism of the evil genius argument remains a standard starting point for current discussions, a starting point that is seen (by contextualists, for example) to provide such a powerful challenge to knowledge that while one as much as contemplates such arguments one loses the right to ascribe knowledge to anyone. 1 Even Descartess less radical skeptical arguments are still widely credited as having tremendous force: Barry Stroud, for example, argues at length that no satisfactory response has yet been given to the dream argument of the First Meditation. 2 The Cartesian response to skepticism, on the other hand, is not nearly so warmly received.In the current literature on skepticism one does not find much resistance to Strouds assessment of the
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".