The new Tarde: Sociology after the end of the social
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IN AN interesting article just recently and elegantly translated from theFrench by Brian Singer, the Canadian social theorist Michel Freitag callsattention to the postmodern phenomenon of ‘the progressive loss of the transcendental dimension represented by the normative reference to Justice’ (2002: 176). What better phrase could sum up the ill-fated history of the strong sociological conception of the social? What is exposed is the diffi-culty in thinking of any universal premises, in the absence of these, that could possibly be laid out for sociology to work from today. For some time we have been moving into a period of uncertainty surrounding the epistemo-logical issues underlying key themes such as justice. But we have also been witnessing a new instability in the illusion of the transcendental, social dimension itself which sociology has so often relied upon as its source of disciplinary necessity. The question has been raised as to whether it is desir-able, or even possible, to continue to think in sociological terms at a time when we are seeing the end of the social. Some thinkers have begun to advance a claim that this moment of disintegration paradoxically ushers in a more radical and direct metaphys-
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".