Beyond neutrality: choosing between logical theories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to examine anti-exceptionalism about logic as an account of rational theory choice in logic, with particular focus on the question of whether logic ought to be neutral with respect to substantive philosophical debates.It critiques two opposing views -Jc Beall's logical quietism, according to which logic ought not to deliver truths, and Timothy Williamson's metaphysical substantivism, according to which logic can settle substantive debates.Drawing on Gillian Russell's logical nihilism and Lakatos's philosophy of methodology, this thesis argue that neutrality is not a theoretical virtue and that quietism collapses into nihilism.To explore the limits of substantivism, this thesis also criticizes both of the most developed accounts of the methodology and epistemology of logic endorsed by anti-exceptionalists, namely, logical abductivism and logical predictivism, and in doing so it argues for a moderate position according to which logic can deliver substantive truths, but cannot settle debates by itself due to its explanatory limits.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.057 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".