DR2 Open Peer Review

Two quantitative researches in the history of philosophy. Some uphazard methodological reflections

Marco Viola

March 25, 2019

This post is the third of a series of  contributions to the DR2 Conference.  Comments are welcome! (How to comment)   guido bonino1, Paolo maffezioli2 & paolo tripodi1 1 University of Turin; 2 University of Barcelona   In this paper we are going to put forth some methodological reflections on two different investigations we have conducted in the context of the DR2 research group. Such investigations were our first serious attempts at applying distant reading techniques and more in general quantitative methods to the history of philosophy. A sketchy preliminary presentation of the two researches is in order as a basis for the methodological remarks. 1.two case studies in quantitative history of philosophy 1.1 Wittgenstein and academic success The first investigation concerns the place of Wittgenstein in contemporary analytic philosophy. Of course, this topic has already been amply investigated by means of the traditional methods of the history of philosophy. A rather convincing historical reconstruction is largely shared within the philosophical community. The story begins in the 1950s and 1960s, when Oxford, and to a lesser extent Cambridge, were the centre of analytic philosophy, and when Wittgenstein – the later Wittgenstein – was regarded as the champion of that philosophical tendency. In the 50s and 60s the Wittgensteinian paradigm was so dominant in Britain, that many people thought that that tradition was about to have a similar impact also on the US. However, things went on differently. That happened presumably for a number of philosophical, cultural, and even geopolitical reasons. Let us just say that the Wittgensteinian tradition has been largely forgotten or rejected by present-day analytic philosophers: it has lost its centrality in Britain, and it has never reached a comparable reputation in the US. That is roughly the story that many philosophers accept and that is told by historians of philosophy. The aim of our work was to check whether a quantitative approach to the history of philosophy can add some interesting details and new insights to the historical-philosophical understanding of the decline of the Wittgensteinian tradition in contemporary analytic philosophy. It is important to realize that, notwithstanding the supposed decline, Wittgenstein has always remained a very important philosopher, a “classic” – so to speak – throughout the whole period under consideration, and that he has always been a very popular subject matter of PhD philosophy dissertations in the US.   We thought that one aspect of the supposed decline of Wittgenstein in the history of analytic philosophy could be investigated by analyzing the academic careers (if any) of those who wrote their dissertation on Wittgenstein, and by comparing them with the careers of those who wrote their dissertation on a “typical” analytic philosopher. In particular, we chose four analytic philosophers, who hold very different views on virtually every subject, but who are almost unanimously regarded as important figures within the analytic community. They are David Lewis, Saul Kripke, Michael Dummett and Jerry Fodor. The first step of the work was that of selecting the philosophy dissertations defended from 1981 to 2010. Then we selected those dissertations in which the name ‘Wittgenstein’ occurs in the abstract. Thus we got 329 dissertations. The same was done with the “analytic” dissertations (we got 404 of them). Then we traced the academic careers (if any) of all the authors of dissertations that had been selected. We attributed a numerical value to the highest position each of them held (if any). We took into account both the academic rank (adjunct, assistant, associate, full professor) and the ranking of the philosophy department (we used a rather rough ranking, based on three levels, and drawn from existing rankings). Then we calculated the average value for each group: this is what we called the Academic Success Index. Figure 3 shows the comparison between Wittgensteinian and analytic dissertations.   As you can see, there is a significant difference between the two groups. The Wittgensteinian “decline” seems to be in some way confirmed. The relatively low Academic Success Index is a manifestation of such a decline. It must be remarked that the Academic Success Index, given the somewhat arbitrary way in which the different factors are weighed, should not be taken too seriously as an absolute value. However, we think that it represents a significant indicator, if it is considered in a comparative way. What makes us confident that the result is rather solid is that we considered other groups of dissertations and made other comparisons, and all of them converge toward its confirmation. More or less the same results can be obtained whether you consider the whole period 1981-2010 or rather the disaggregated data for five-year periods, whether you focus on strictly Wittgensteinian theses or you take into account also those in which Wittgenstein is a minor topic, whether you normalize the Academic Success Index for academic age or not, etc.; moreover the Academic Success Index of Wittgenstein is low not only with respect to typical analytic philosophers, but also with respect to some other groups of dissertations we chose as control groups: Gadamer, Spinoza and a random sample of the dissertations.   What does all that mean? Everybody knows that correlation is not causation. The fact that those who write a dissertation on Wittgenstein are less likely to enjoy academic success with respect to those who write their dissertation on a typical recent analytic philosopher (or on Spinoza, for that matter) does not by itself mean that the choice of the subject matter of their dissertation is in any way a cause of their not so brilliant career. We tried in our work to show, by means of different comparisons of data, that the choice of the subject matter is at least a genuine cause, among others, of the difference in academic success. But why, and how, does a philosophical topic make a difference for academic success? Using a visualization software, we found this.         These maps have been obtained by retrieving and counting the occurrences of terms in the abstracts of the theses. The size of an item’s label and the size of an item’s circle depend on the number of occurrences of the item. Looking at the analytic map, we found a pattern that we did not recognize in the Wittgensteinian one. The keywords on the map (that is, the biggest blue circles), suggest the idea that philosophy is a kind of theory – ‘theory’ is the main keyword – which provides arguments, gives accounts, defends claims, in order to solve problems. Theory, argument, problem, account, claim: these are all important keywords on the analytic map. It is a pattern that alludes to a science-oriented style and metaphilosophical view. To sum up the present results: it seemed to us that the difference of academic success may be (partly) explained by the presence (and the absence) of certain semantic patterns; such patterns, in turn, point to the presence (and the absence) of a science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy. Therefore this is perhaps our main thesis: the index of academic success for PhD candidates in US philosophy departments in the last forty years is quite strictly connected to the choice of a more or less science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy. Did our quantitative research add anything original to the picture of the decline of Wittgenstein provided by historians of philosophy by means of traditional methods? We think so. We have retrieved, measured, read and interpreted a relatively large amount of data, and by examining the data we have pointed out the metaphoric place where the decline of Wittgenstein began. It is up there, so to speak, in the very same place in which the process of academic recruitment takes place. Our results seem to suggest that the decline of Wittgenstein, which at least in part depends on the choice of a certain topic for the PhD dissertation (a topic more or less associated to science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy), is not due, so to speak, to a widespread Zeitgeist. If a philosopher is simply out of the Zeitgeist, or against the tide of history, it is likely that people cease to speak of his work: for example, PhD students would probably write few dissertations on him. Here we have to do with a different phenomenon: the decline of Wittgenstein seems to be a consequence of a top-down process, or better: of a process driven from the top, a process guided by a relatively small number of people, i.e. those academics who hold the power of influencing the recruitment policies in the philosophy departments. Of course, this remark is nothing but a suggestion. More work should be done, and more data should be analysed, in order to make the suggestion a solidly confirmed hypothesis. However, it is not an airy-fairy suggestion either. 1.2 Logic in analytic philosophy The aim of our second work was that of substantiating with data the widely shared view according to which logic has become increasingly central in analytic philosophy. The corpus taken into consideration comprises all the articles published in five important philosophical journals (The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, The Philosophical Review, The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) in the time span 1941-2010. To give a concise anticipatory overview, we provided some results concerning the overall presence of logic in these articles, the relative technical sophistication of the logic used for philosophical purposes, the kind of use that is made of logic (i.e., subject matter vs. instrumental). Our guiding questions were: What are the relations between analytic philosophy and logic? What is the role of logic in analytic philosophy? Would you need logic to do analytic philosophy? The common opinion is that logic is very important in analytic philosophy. However, to understand better what the role of logic in (analytic) philosophy is, it seemed interesting to us to investigate how much logic and what kind of logic is present in philosophy, and how it is used. Distant reading and, more generally, quantitative methods allowed us to find more interesting and reliable answers to such questions.   By distantly or – as Moretti once said – serially reading all the articles in which logic is in some way present, for each paper we raised the following two questions. Q1: What does this paper use logic for? Q2: What level of logical competence does this paper require? In answering Q1, we distinguished an instrumental and a non-instrumental role of logic in philosophy. By non-instrumental uses we mean either doing logic properly understood (= giving proofs, demonstrating theorems, and so forth) or dealing with logic as a subject matter of philosophy (= investigating the philosophy of logic). Instrumental uses are those that can be found in articles in which the role of logic is that of providing an instrument for philosophy: logic as an instrument for doing moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and so forth. A third category (“Other”) includes history of logic and inductive logic.   Logic as an instrument increases over time, logic as a discipline does not: philosophy of logic decreases and logic proper remains constant (with negligible numbers). The common opinion seems to be confirmed by data, but it does not tell the whole story. Even with respect to Q2, we wanted to find an answer as precise and complete as possible. In order to get to such an answer, we proposed a method to measure the level of “logical sophistication”. We have represented in a map the most relevant topics in logic, from logical preliminaries to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, so to speak. The map is based on a comparative analysis of the table of contents of ten well-known logic textbooks and online courses. Technically, the map consists in a graph with nodes labelled by logical topics and arrows connecting the nodes. The nodes are the following: Preliminaries: prel Propositional logic: pl Propositional modal logic: pml Non-classical propositional logics: ncpl First-order logic: fol Peano arithmetic: pa Proof theory: pt Second-order logic: sol Model theory: mt Set theory: st First-order modal logic: foml   The numbers represent […]

Posted in History of philosophy, Logic, Open Peer Review, Wittgenstein | 2 Comments »