Bibliographic record
Abstract
William Paley objects to David Hume’s sceptical arguments against miracle testimony by asserting what looks like a methodological principle of argumentation: only reject shared testimony from multiple credible sources if a reasonable alternative explanation for the testimony is available. Call this Paley’s Principle. Other writers, from Plutarch to Richard Dawkins, have either supported Paley directly in this claim or offered similar thoughts about the importance of alternative explanations. I explore the kind of norm or obligation that Paley’s Principle could express, and discuss some empirical evidence regarding the efficacy of alternative explanations in changing people’s minds. A defensible element of Paley’s claim is more a matter of how we treat interlocutors than of how we treat evidence; but the two overlap when the evidence cited in an argument is testimonial.
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 | 0.025 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
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".