Maximilian Noichl

This paper presents an approach of unsupervised learning of clusters from a citation database, and applies it to a large corpus of articles in philosophy to give an account of the structure of the discipline. Following a list of journals from the PhilPapers-archive, 68,152 records were downloaded from the Reuters Web of Science-Database. Their citation data was processed using dimensionality reduction and clustering. The resulting clusters were identified, and the results are graphically represented. They suggest that the division of analytic and Continental philosophy in the considered timespan is overstated; that analytical, in contrast to Continental philosophy does not form a coherent group in recent philosophy; and that metaphors about the disciplinary structure should focus on the coherence and interconnectedness of a multitude of smaller and larger subfields.

A commonly held background assumption about the sciences is that they connect along borders characterized by ontological or explanatory relationships, usually given in the order of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences. Interdisciplinary work, in this picture, arises in the connecting regions of adjacent disciplines. Philosophical research into interdisciplinary model transfer has increasingly complicated this picture by highlighting additional connections orthogonal to it. But most of these works have been done through case studies, which due to their strong focus struggle to provide foundations for claims about large-scale relations between multiple scientific disciplines. As a supplement, in this contribution, we propose to philosophers of science the use of modern science mapping techniques to trace connections between modeling techniques in large literature samples. We explain in detail how these techniques work, and apply them to a large, contemporary, and multidisciplinary data set (n=383.961 articles). Through the comparison of textual to mathematical representations, we suggest formulaic structures that are particularly common among different disciplines and produce first results indicating the general strength and commonality of such relationships.