What is this thing called Philosophy of Science? A computational topic-modeling perspective, 1934–2015

Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (2):215-249 (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research topics that span across 82 years. We also tracked their evolution and fluctuating significance over time in the journal articles. Our results concur with and document known and lesser-known episodes of the philosophy of science, including the rise and fall of logic and language-related topics, the relative stability of a metaphysical and ontological questioning (space and time, causation, natural kinds, realism), the significance of epistemological issues about the nature of scientific knowledge as well as the rise of a recent philosophy of biology and other trends. These analyses exemplify how computational text-mining methods can be used to provide an empirical large-scale and data-driven perspective on the history of philosophy of science that is complementary to other current historical approaches.

Similar books and articles

The Cambridge handbook of computational psychology.Ron Sun (ed.) - 2008 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Coal to Diamonds.Johannes Lenhard - 2013 - Foundations of Science 18 (3):583-586.
Computational Models.Paul Humphreys - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (S3):S1-S11.
Perspectives on Modeling in Cognitive Science.Richard M. Shiffrin - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (4):736-750.
Computational models.Paul Humphreys - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S1-S11.

Analytics

Added to PP
2019-05-14

Downloads
590 (#27,090)

6 months
153 (#17,242)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Christophe Malaterre
Université Du Québec À Montréal (UQAM)

References found in this work

Whence Philosophy of Biology?Jason M. Byron - 2007 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (3):409-422.
evoText: A new tool for analyzing the biological sciences.Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:83-87.

View all 12 references / Add more references