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Record W7117887750 · doi:10.33137/js.v6i.46706

Conditional Authority Delegation

2025· article· W7117887750 on OpenAlex
Paul Patton, Landon See, Carlin Henikoff

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.

Bibliographic record

VenueScientonomy Journal for the Science of Science · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldPhysics and Astronomy
TopicSpace Science and Extraterrestrial Life
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDelegationRelation (database)TypologyAuthentication (law)Meaning (existential)Delegated authority

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

While the current scientonomic definition of authority delegation implicitly presupposes that epistemic agents accept expert judgments unconditionally, this assumption fails to capture a wide range of historical and contemporary epistemic practices. The paper proposes a revised typology that distinguishes unconditional authority delegation from conditional authority delegation and offers a general definition of authority delegation that subsumes both. Conditional authority delegation is characterized as a relation in which a delegating agent accepts expert answers to a question only if those answers satisfy some additional criteria that are part of the method employed by the delegating agent. The paper also proposes an indicator for identifying historical cases of conditional delegation. To show that cases of conditional authority delegation exist, three historical episodes are analyzed: the authentication of a disputed Monet painting by the Wildenstein Institute, the nineteenth-century debate between physicists and geologists over the age of the Earth, and the mid-twentieth-century reception of radioastronomical data by steady-state cosmologists. The paper concludes by outlining implications for future theoretical refinement and observational research in scientonomy.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.023
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Scholarly communication, Open science
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.439
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0230.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.012
Science and technology studies0.0150.041
Scholarly communication0.0030.005
Open science0.0060.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.350
Teacher spread0.323 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it