Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are significant ambiguities in how “atheism” is to be understood or interpreted. Having considered these, we turn to Hume’s arguments and assess to what extent his views in the Dialogues should be interpreted in these terms. While it is evident that Hume opposed “superstition” and that he was, in this sense, plainly an irreligious thinker, this does not settle the question of his “atheism”. Although Hume has been read by some as an theist of a minimal kind, and by others as a sceptic or agnostic, both these accounts are rejected. Hume was, it is argued, a “hard sceptical atheist”, by which we understand him to take the view that we have probable (non-dogmatic) grounds for denying the theist hypothesis in all its forms. His “speculative atheism” is accompanied by a “practical atheism” which, while firmly opposed “superstition”, is willing to ally itself with both sceptics and those theists (or deists) who share Hume’s opposition to “superstition”.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| 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".