Eight journals over eight decades: a computational topic-modeling approach to contemporary philosophy of science
- PDF / 1,612,339 Bytes
- 41 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 64 Downloads / 170 Views
Eight journals over eight decades: a computational topic-modeling approach to contemporary philosophy of science Christophe Malaterre1,2 Jonathan St-Onge1,2
· Francis Lareau3 · Davide Pulizzotto2,4 ·
Received: 8 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2021
Abstract As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools (e.g., logical empiricism) or major figures of the field (e.g., Carnap, Kuhn), little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms to eight major philosophy of science journals, from the 1930s up until 2017. Based on the full-text content of some 15,897 articles, we identified 25 research themes and 8 thematic clusters that show how the research agenda of the philosophy of science has changed in its content over the course of the last eight decades, up to the philosophy of science we now know. We also show how each one of the journals contributed in its own way to this thematic evolution. Keywords Philosophy of science journals · Topic modeling · Text mining · Digital humanities · Digital philosophy
B
Christophe Malaterre [email protected]
1
Département de philosophie, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 455 boulevard René-Lévesque Est, Montreal, QC H3C 3P8, Canada
2
Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 1205 rue Saint-Denis, Montreal, QC H3C 3P8, Canada
3
Département d’informatique, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 201 avenue Président-Kennedy, Montreal, QC H2X 3Y7, Canada
4
Département d’études littéraires, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 405 rue Sainte-Catherine Est, Montreal, QC H3C 3P8, Canada
123
Synthese
1 Introduction The life of academic disciplines is closely tied to that of their journals. This is very much so in the natural sciences, but also in the human and social sciences where journals constitute one of the most significant venues for published research. The discipline of philosophy of science is no different: alongside monographs and edited volumes, disciplinary journals have become an increasingly important vehicle for research outcome over the past decades. While the boundaries with the broader discipline of philosophy may be quite permeable (Wray 2010), some journals have come to play a most central role in the development of the philosophy of science up to what it is today. This is for instance the case of journals such as Erkenntnis, Synthese or Philosophy of Science for which the first issues all go back to the 1930s, but also of several other journals that have been founded since—including the recently established European Journal for the Philosophy of Science—an
Data Loading...
