Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ernest Gellner was most often termed a polymath by those impressed by his achievements. This is entirely comprehensible because he had distinct reputations in several fields, notably as theorist of Islam and nationalism and as both anthropologist and philosopher. But Gellner himself was wont to bridle at this sort of description, stating that beneath these different fields lay a common set of concerns. What was on Gellner's mind at this point is straightforward: he was claiming intellectual greatness. It is easy to see what he meant. Significance in a thinker derives from the presence of an underlying metaphysic rather than from facility in different fields of endeavour. The purpose of this chapter is to identify Gellner's metaphysic and to subject it to analysis. Two immediate words of caution are in order. First, to capture every element of Gellner's core concerns in a single essay is impossible. Accordingly concentration here is more on the philosophical than on the sociological elements of his metaphysic, on the grounds that these were crucial to Gellner himself, at all times of his life, yet have been almost wholly neglected in the secondary literature. Of course, there is no easy divide between philosophy and sociology within Gellner's work, and his metaphysic has historical and sociological elements at its core. Still, concentration here is on philosophical claims rather than on his sociology of open and closed societies. Second, my own analytic stance combines elements of appreciation with suggested modifications in a slightly unstable mix.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".