Eugenio Petrovich

SOPHIS (Social Observatory of PHIlosophy of Science) is an open-access database specifically designed for the quantitative study of philosophy of science. SOPHIS integrates information on epistemic contents, their material carriers, and the individual and collective actors involved in their production and dissemination, offering a unified framework for mapping the epistemic and social landscape of the field. SOPHIS is available in three formats: As a graph database in a neo4j file As a relational database in a SQLite file As a collection of tables in separate.csv files The meta-graph and the relational diagram are available as well.

This paper supplements existing work on the development of logical empiricism with new quantitative data concerning the movement’s reception in the United States. Using EDHIPHY (“Enriched Data for the History of Philosophy”), a relational database specifically designed for bibliometric research on the development of twentieth-century philosophy, we trace the impact of logical empiricism on American philosophy before and after the migration. Specifically, we make use of EDHIPHY’s mention index, a catalogue of 1,095,765 mention links extracted from 22,977 full-text articles published in 12 Anglophone philosophy journals between 1890 and 1979 and conduct a comparative analysis of these mentions over time. We (1) explore the relative impact of 11 prominent representatives of logical empiricism, (2) compare the movement’s reception with a number of contemporaneous philosophical schools, (3) map its evolving place in the American philosophical landscape through a series of co-mention analyses, and (4) dissect logical empiricism’s reception by exploring the role of various journals and universities.

In this chapter, the research object of the book is introduced: Late Analytic Philosophy, namely the period of analytic philosophy that spans from 1980 to today. In the first part of the chapter, we discuss the different meanings of analytic philosophy and we characterize it as a socio-professional entity in contemporary academia, abandoning any attempt to define it in philosophical terms. Then, in the second part of the chapter, we focus on the Late Analytic Philosophy and we discuss several historical trends that characterize it: the growing size, the specialization and fragmentation, the professionalization, and the scientization of its research practices. We then argue that a quantitative approach is best suited for investigating these field-level features. In the last part of the chapter, we discuss the specific representation of Late Analytic Philosophy that will ground the empirical analyses of the book. This representation is based on the philosophical articles published in five prestigious journals.

In this chapter, the research object of the book is introduced: the margins of the philosophical text. We show that the citations and the acknowledgments that appear on the margins of the main text, forming the so-called para-text, offer a novel perspective on philosophy. In the first part, we explain why these peculiar margins represent privileged points of access to the epistemological inter-text and social extra-text of the analytic text. Then, we argue that the potential of citations and acknowledgments is fully released only when they are studied en masse, adopting suitable quantitative techniques. Lastly, we specify that our investigation will focus on late analytic philosophy, i.e., analytic philosophy from the 1980s to the present day, and we provide an overview of the main contents of the book.

In this chapter, we investigate by different types of citation analysis the structure and dynamics of Late Analytic Philosophy in order to shed light on the processes of fragmentation and specialization. We try to answer questions such as: When did these processes begin? What is their pace? How did they carve the overall structure of the field? The key notion of documental space is introduced to guide the analyses: the documental space is defined as the universe of documents that are cited by the articles published in the five analytic philosophy journals that form our bibliographic representation of Late Analytic Philosophy. The first set of analyses investigates the structure of Late Analytic Philosophy using a co-citation map. The next set of analyses focuses instead on the dynamics of the field. Patterns in the citation trends of the most cited documents are examined, a data-driven periodization of the documental space is introduced, and, lastly, longitudinal co-citation maps are analyzed. The chapter concludes with a theoretical reflection on the meaning of citation counts and co-citation clusters.

By looking at the textual context that surrounds in-text citations, it is possible to reconstruct the epistemological functions that they play in the citing text. In this way, constructive or destructive epistemological operations can be traced with citation analysis. In this chapter, the technique of epistemological citation context analysis is used to investigate how knowledge accumulates in analytic philosophy and, in particular, to assess whether analytic philosophy has entered into a Kuhnian normal-scientific phase. The classification of more than 1,700 citations from 70 analytic philosophy articles published between 1950 and 2019 shows that a soft paradigm has taken over in the field. Differently from classic Kuhnian normal sciences in which a paradigm attracts the consensus of the community, in analytic philosophy the soft paradigm guarantees the stability of the structure of the field itself. The Chapter concludes by discussing the complex interplay of epistemology and rhetoric in the use of citations.

Knowledge systems, including analytic philosophy, can be modeled as multi-layer networks comprising three layers: the semantic, the semiotic, and the social. In this chapter, we show how, by leveraging the information contained in the acknowledgments, we can successfully investigate the social layer of recent analytic philosophy. In the first part of the chapter, network analysis is used to reconstruct the sociological fine-grained structure of the discipline. Different types of philosophers are distinguished based on their position in the social network, and a core and a periphery are individuated. In the second part of the chapter, citations and acknowledgments are combined to investigate the interface between the semantic and the social layers. Socio-epistemic communities are identified and the overlap between the social and epistemic influence of analytic philosophers is assessed.

This conclusive chapter discusses how the quantitative analysis of citations and acknowledgments can improve the discipline of philosophy. Then, it sketches a portrait of the Quantitative Studies of Philosophy (QSP), the new research field that this book aims to contribute to. We first advance a working hypothesis on the scope and methods of QSP. Then, a bespoke corpus of 76 publications representative of QSP is analyzed to reveal the temporal development, main topics, areas of philosophy investigated, axes of analysis, and types of data used in QSP. After this quantitative portrait of QSP, three rationales for a quantitative approach to the study of philosophy are distinguished and assessed: the overcoming of human limitations through computers, the epistemological superiority of data compared to qualitative evidence, and the desire to gain a new perspective on philosophy able to reveal otherwise invisible structures. In the last section, we attempt to imagine the future of QSP, suggesting a research agenda for the next generation of researchers.

In this chapter, the acknowledgments that appeared in 2,075 articles published between 2005 and 2019 in the “Top Five” analytic philosophy journals are analyzed with both qualitative and quantitative techniques. After framing the acknowledgments as zones of a sui generis communication between authors and readers, which enable analytic philosophers to place themselves in the social space of analytic philosophy, the first part of the chapter focuses on the stylistics of the acknowledgments. Unwritten norms and conventions that shape the acknowledgments as a literary genre are reconstructed and explained in the light of the theory of acknowledgments as positioning signals (Chap. 2). Then, in the second part of the chapter, a quantitative approach is used to measure different social dimensions of the acknowledgees population. In this way, the social space of recent analytic philosophy is charted.

Citations and acknowledgments are at the core of the empirical investigations conducted in this book. In this chapter, the main theories developed to explain the meaning and function of these two para-textual elements are presented. Against this background, the theoretical approach that underlies the empirical studies of the next sections of the book is delineated. Citation theories are divided into causal and structural theories. The former group includes two opposing theories proposed by sociologists of science (i.e., the normative and the persuasion theory of citations). The latter includes a theory developed by scientometricians (the theory of indicators) and the theoretical approach chosen for the book (the epistemic theory of citations). As to the acknowledgments theory, two accounts, the normative and the strategic, are presented. Drawing elements from both of them, the approach of the book, called the theory of acknowledgments as positioning signals, is distilled.

The article investigates what happens when philosophy meets and begins to establish connections with two formal research methods such as game theory and network science. We use citation analysis to identify, among the articles published in Synthese and Philosophy of Science between 1985 and 2021, those that cite the specialistic literature in game theory and network science. Then, we investigate the structure of the two corpora thus identified by bibliographic coupling and divide them into clusters of related papers by automatic community detection. Lastly, we construct by the same bibliometric techniques a reference map of philosophy, on which we overlay our corpora to map the diffusion of game theory and network science in the various sub-areas of recent philosophy. Three main results derive from this study. Philosophers are interested not only in using and investigating game theory as a formal method belonging to applied mathematics and sharing many relevant features with social choice theory, but also in considering its applications in more empirically oriented disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive science, or biology. Philosophers focus on networks in two research contexts and in two different ways: in the debate on causality and scientific explanation, they consider the results of network science; in social epistemology, they employ network science as a formal tool. In the reference map, logic—whose use in philosophy dates back to a much earlier period—is distributed in a more uniform way than recently encountered disciplines such as game theory and network science. We conclude by discussing some methodological limitations of our bibliometric approach, especially with reference to the problem of field delineation.

This book offers an unprecedented quantitative portrait of analytic philosophy focusing on two seemingly marginal features of philosophical texts: citations and acknowledgements in academic publications. Originating from a little network of philosophers based in Oxford, Cambridge, and Vienna, analytic philosophy has become during the Twentieth century a thriving philosophical community with thousands of members worldwide. Leveraging the most advanced techniques from bibliometrics, citations and acknowledgments are used in this book to shed light on both the epistemology and the sociology of this philosophical field, illuminating the intellectual trajectory of analytic philosophy as well as the social characteristics of the analytic community. Special attention is dedicated to the last forty years, providing insights into a phase of analytic philosophy which is still understudied by historians of philosophy. In the eight chapters of the book, readers will find not only numerous quantitative investigations and technical explanations, but also a robust theoretical framework and epistemological reflections on the strengths and limitations of quantitative methods for the study of philosophy. With its strong interdisciplinary appeal, this book will engage a wide range of scholars, including historians of philosophy seeking new methodologies, analytic philosophers interested in a new look at their discipline, and scholars in digital humanities, bibliometrics, and quantitative studies of science, who will find many innovative techniques for investigating disciplinary fields.

Standard citation-based bibliometric tools have severe limitations when they are applied to periods in the history of science and the humanities before the advent of now-current citation practices. This paper presents an alternative method involving the extracting and analysis of mentions to map and analyze links between scholars and texts in periods that fall outside the scope of citation-based studies. Focusing on one specific discipline in one particular period and language area—Anglophone philosophy between 1890 and 1979—we describe a procedure to create a mention index by identifying, extracting, and disambiguating mentions in academic publications. Our mention index includes 1,095,765 mention links, extracted from 22,977 articles published in 12 journals. We successfully link 93% of these mentions to specific philosophers, with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. Moreover, we integrate the mention index into a database named EDHIPHY, which includes data and metadata from multiple sources and enables multidimensional mention analyses. In the final part of the paper, we present four case studies conducted by domain experts, demonstrating the use and the potential of both EDHIPHY and mention analyses more generally.

Science maps are visual representations of the structure and dynamics of scholarly knowl­edge. They aim to show how fields, disciplines, journals, scientists, publications, and scientific terms relate to each other. Science mapping is the body of methods and techniques that have been developed for generating science maps. This entry is an introduction to science maps and science mapping. It focuses on the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues of science mapping, rather than on the mathematical formulation of science mapping techniques. After a brief history of science mapping, we describe the general procedure for building a science map, presenting the data sources and the methods to select, clean, and pre-process the data. Next, we examine in detail how the most common types of science maps, namely the citation-based and the term-based, are generated. Both are based on networks: the former on the network of publications connected by citations, the latter on the network of terms co-occurring in publications. We review the rationale behind these mapping approaches, as well as the techniques and methods to build the maps. We also present less-common types of science maps, including co-authorship networks, interlocking editorship networks, maps based on patents’ data, and geographic maps of science. Moreover, we consider how time can be represented in science maps to investigate the dynamics of science. We also discuss some epistemological and sociological topics that can help in the interpretation, contextualization, and assessment of science maps. Then, we present some possible applications of science maps in science policy. In the conclusion, we point out why science mapping may be interesting for all the branches of meta-science, from knowl­edge organization to epistemology.

_Abstract_: Fueled by the rapid development of neuroscientific tools and techniques, some scholars consider the shift from traditional cognitive psychology toward cognitive neuroscience to be a _revolution_ (most notably Boone and Piccinini). However, the term “revolution” in philosophy of science can easily be construed as involving a paradigm shift in the sense of Kuhn’s _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. Is a Kuhnian account sound in the case at hand? To answer this question, we consider heuristic indicators of two features of paradigm shifts: the incommensurability of ontologies; and a gap between scientific communities. Based on our evidence, we argue that no revolution has occurred (at least, not yet). _Keywords_: Cognitive Neuroscience; Cognitive Psychology; Philosophy of Science; Thomas Kuhn; Scientometrics _La “rivoluzione delle neuroscienze cognitive” non è una rivoluzione (in senso kuhniano). Evidenze scientometriche _ _Riassunto_:_ _Complice il rapido sviluppo di strumenti e tecniche in neuroscienze, alcuni studiosi (in particolare Boone e Piccinini) intendono il passaggio dalla psicologia cognitiva classica alla neuroscienza cognitiva nei termini di una _rivoluzione_. Tuttavia, il termine ‘rivoluzione’ in filosofia della scienza è strettamente associato alla nozione di successione di paradigmi esposta da Kuhn ne _La struttura delle rivoluzioni scientifiche_. Obiettivo di questo lavoro è capire se effettivamente la concezione kuhniana offra una corretta descrizione di questa dinamica storica. In particolare, prenderemo in esame due indicatori euristici delle rivoluzioni kuhniane: l’incommensurabilità ontologica trai due paradigmi e la diversa composizione demografica delle comunità scientifiche. Sulla base delle evidenze scientometriche che prenderemo in esame, affermeremo che non è avvenuta nessuna rivoluzione (almeno per ora). _Parole chiave_: Neuroscienze cognitive; Psicologia cognitiva; Filosofia della scienza; Thomas Kuhn; Scientometria.

In the last decades, research in science mapping has delivered several powerful techniques, based on citation or textual analysis, for charting the intellectual organization of research fields. To map the social network underlying science and scholarship, by contrast, science mapping has mainly relied on one method, co-authorship analysis. This method, however, suffers from well-known limitations related to the practice of authorship. Moreover, it does not perform well on those fields where multi-authored publications are rare. In this study, a new method for mapping the social structure of research fields is advanced, based on the analysis of the acknowledgments of academic publications. We first discuss the standard account of the function of acknowledgments in scholarly communication, then we introduce a new interpretative framework in which the acknowledgments are intended as positioning signals exchanged by researchers. Next, we provide the formal definition of the four acknowledgments-based networks that stand at the core of the method, and we test it on a humanities field, analytic philosophy. Results show that acknowledgement-based networks allow to reconstruct the fine-grained social structure of analytic philosophy from different perspectives. Furthermore, by comparing the citation-based maps of the field with the acknowledgments-based networks, it permits to shed light on the relationship between the intellectual and social layer of analytic philosophy. We conclude by presenting practical limitations of the method and by sketching some further research lines.

We provide a quantitative analysis of the philosophy-neuroscience nexus using citation analysis. Combining bibliometric indicators of cross-field visibility with journal citation mapping techniques, we investigate four dimensions of the nexus: how the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and of philosophy in neuroscience has changed over time, which areas of philosophy are more interested in neuroscience, which areas of neuroscience are more interested in philosophy, and how the trading zone between the two fields is configured. We also discuss two hypotheses: the supposed occurrence of a neuro-revolution in philosophy and the role of psychology as the disciplinary link between neuroscience and philosophy. Both the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and the visibility of philosophy in neuroscience have increased significantly from 1980 to 2020, albeit the latter remains an order of magnitude lower than the former. Neuroscience is particularly visible in philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of science, but not in ‘core’ areas of analytic philosophy. Philosophy is particularly visible in cognitive and systems neuroscience and neuropsychiatry, but not in biomedical neuroscience. As for the trading zone between philosophy and neuroscience, our data show that it works differently in philosophy and in neuroscience. While some philosophy journals are active loci of bidirectional communication, neuroscience journals are divided between journals ‘importing’ philosophy in neuroscience and journals ‘exporting’ neuroscience to philosophy. Lastly, data do not support the hypothesis that a widespread neuro-revolution has transformed philosophy radically, but support the hypothesis that psychology functions as a mediating disciplinary link between philosophy and neuroscience.