The Hubris and Folly of Defining a Discipline: Reflections on the Evolution of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article describes the challenge of defining or conceiving a discipline that arose upon the request to edit a massive volume, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology , as part of a series of Companions published by Wiley-Blackwell on key disciplines in religious and theological studies. It explores significant dynamics and interests behind the conceptualization and organization of the Companion and then addresses some of the benefits and limitations or growing edges, answering specific questions or concerns raised by three scholars in their papers presented at a symposium on the Companion at the University of Toronto in November 2012. The publication of the Companion to Practical Theology marks immense progress in the field in the last fifty years, making this an auspicious time for reassessment and reflection.
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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 | 0.050 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.132 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".