2001. Who’s afraid of “rational choice theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself. The Communist Manifesto With apologies to Marx and Engels, the specter that is haunting political science these days is not communism, but something that is commonly called “rational choice theory, ” and many political scientists are busily engaged in forming coalitions among otherwise disparate factions to oppose it. One casualty of their opposition has been a proper understanding of what this specter actually con-sists of. Another, I fear, may be the training of graduate students whose only interest is in acquiring the skills they will need for successful careers in political science. It is for them that I have decided to confront this nursery tale of the specter of rational choice theory with the following personal manifesto. Theorize this! It is impossible to understand what is at stake in this con-troversy if one does not understand what a valid argument is, why the validity of arguments is important, and why it is often difficult to construct valid arguments or to de-termine whether an argument is valid or not. The signifi-cance of valid arguments can be illustrated in the simplest possible way by a visit to the dog pound. Suppose a man wants to find an inexpensive dog for his children to play with, and goes to the dog pound to look for one. He naturally wants a dog that will be good with his children, and not one that would maul them. Sup-pose the attendant assures him that a particular dog would have that quality. Skeptical, he might ask, “How do you know that, and why should I believe it? ” The attendant might reply that the dog in question was a Labrador re-triever. “So? ” the man might reply, to which the attendant
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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 | 0.011 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.007 |
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".