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2024 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

6. The Social Space of Analytic Philosophy

verfasst von : Eugenio Petrovich

Erschienen in: A Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

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.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Knowledge Accumulation in Analytic Philosophy

Nächstes Kapitel Socio-Epistemic Communities in Analytic Philosophy

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Note that the operation can be successful only on the background of the rules. In this sense, it presupposes the genre’s rules rather than suppressing them.

To avoid weighing down the bibliography at the end of the Chapter, we use the ID that identifies the acknowledgments in the database available in the Supplementary Materials.

In the case of multi-authored articles, it is by far more common for authors to opt for the first person plural “We” rather than for writing in the third person. See for instance:

For helpful feedback and discussion, we thank Josh Alexander, Peter Blouw, Carolyn Buckwalter, Ori Friedman, Kareem Khailfa, Joshua Knobe, Jonathan Livengood, Charles Millar, Dylan Murray, Blake Myers-Schulz, Jonathan Schaffer, Eric Schwitzgebel, Angelo Turri, and two anonymous reviewers. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and an Ontario Early Researcher Award. (ID 1068)

On 1,974 articles featuring an acknowledgment, the academic title “Professor” occurs only in 4.

Dedicated to Lilian (ID 1702).

This convention can be found in other fields, such as economics (see Rose & Georg, 2021).

There is a curious case in which the topos is reversed. In this case, the acknowledgees are those who may have forgotten the author:

I am indebted to the following for particularly full discussion or for penetrating questions (which they may well not remember) that made me understand my topic better [11 names follow] (ID 1695).

Note the inversion of the topos of the humble author mentioned above.

An author thanks the referees for having received their comments in “an extremely reasonable time-frame” (ID 1062).

Recently, peer review has fueled several debates among analytic philosophers, see for instance (Katzav & Vaesen, 2017). Peer review is intensively scrutinized also in the sciences, where several experiments for improving the classic blind review are taking place (see Waltman et al., 2022 for a systematization of the peer review debate in the sciences and Baldwin, 2018 for the history of peer review).

As Bazerman notes, “Understanding the genre one is working in is understanding decorum in the most fundamental sense—what stance and attitude is appropriate given the world one is engaged in at that moment” (Bazerman, 1988, p. 320).

Frodeman (2013) and Unterhuber et al. (2014) are among the few studies that present some statistics on the incidence of external funding in academic philosophy.

No distinction was made between funding from the central Spanish government and funding from regional agencies, such as the Catalan ICREA Acadèmia.

https://www.templeton.org/about/vision-mission-impact.

The method for assigning papers to research areas is explained in Sect. 7.4 of the next Chap. 7.

We extracted from WoS also the cited references of the articles, that will be used in the analyses of the next chapter.

In this analysis, Scopus was preferred to Web of Science because Scopus has a system of author disambiguation that creates unique profiles for authors and generates author-level bibliometric statistics. The Python package pybliometrix was used to query Scopus’ APIs (Rose & Kitchin, 2019).

This simple heuristics is based on the assumption that most of the acknowledgees’ scientific production belongs to philosophy or cognate areas. The assumption is true in the vast majority of cases but inevitably produces an underestimation of acknowledgees from non-humanities fields. Still, it was needed to deal with very common names that match dozens of profiles in Scopus.

In fact, there are two outliers: one paper with 9 authors and one paper with 46 authors. These exceptions, however, are explained by the fact that they are both papers in experimental philosophy. The first is about the evaluation of Gettier cases in different cultures, the second is a memorial paper dedicated to a founding father of experimental philosophy on the occasion of his retirement. In the first case, the high number of co-authors reflects the experimental work, in the second case, we have probably to do with symbolic authorship.

The reference is to the Gospel of Matthew, in which it is said: For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

The last two are dummy variables. The former is 1 for males and 0 for females, the latter takes the values of 1 if the affiliation is placed in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, 0 otherwise. For acknowledgees who changed their affiliation over time, the variable was set to 1 if at least one of their affiliations was placed in an English-speaking country.

When using regression analysis, it is crucial to remember the famous statistical mantra “correlation is not causation”: the coefficients estimated via the regression measure the correlation between variables but are not enough to establish neither the presence of a causal link nor the direction of the causation.

Based on the diagnostic of the regression, we removed three data points that are outliers in some respect. They correspond to David Chalmers (outlier for mentions), David Lewis (outlier for citations in the five journals), and Jerry Fodor (outlier for citations in Scopus). Removing these outliers improves the robustness of the results of the regression. The low variance inflation factors (VIF) of the six dependant variables guarantee that the regression is not affected by multicollinearity, i.e., that the dependant variables are not mutually correlated (the highest correlation coefficient is between Cits and Pubs, which have \(R^2 = 0.72\)).

The relationship between citations and mentions is explored in more detail in the next chapter.

Remember the caveats on the gender attribution presented above in Sect. 6.4.1.

A Chi-squared test was used to determine whether the difference between the observed and expected frequencies in Table 6.7 is statistically significant. The results reject the null hypothesis (\(\chi ^2(1, N = 7,017) = 13.527\), p < 0.001) but the effect size, i.e., the strength of the association between the variable on the rows and the variable on the columns results to be very low (Cramer’s V = 0.044).

Our statistical unit is therefore the article, not the author. Selecting the article is preferable because it avoids many difficulties. In fact, choosing the author as the unit, we would have an issue when an author writes a paper with an author of the other gender (a man with a woman and vice versa). In this case, we could not determine how many of the acknowledgees mentioned should be attributed to each co-author. If we attribute all to both authors, then we have a duplication of acknowledgees that causes an artificial expansion in the number of total mentions. To keep constant the number of mentions, we should fractionalize the mention in equal parts among the authors, but in this way, we would penalize authors that write in multi-authored papers and thus introduce a further distortion.

\(H(2) = 1.2274\), p-value = 0.5414 (not significant). Median acknowledgees by only female articles = Median acknowledgees by only male articles = 6. Median acknowledgees by mixed articles = 5.5.

In truth, the facets are not perfectly symmetric because, in a few papers, the sum of the percentages of female acknowledgees and male acknowledgees is not equal to 100%. This happens when papers mention, in addition to women and men, also acknowledgees who did not receive a gender attribution.

The p-values, corrected for multiple comparisons, are respectively 0.0005 and 0.0010.

Note that the percentages are different from those computed for the distributions because the former are ratios of totals (\(\frac{\sum k_{f}}{\sum k}\)), the latter are averages of percentages (\(\frac{1}{n}\sum {\frac{k_f}{k}}\)). The latter are more sensitive to outliers than the former.

In the following statistics, the acknowledgees that changed country, city or institution during the observation period were attributed to all the countries, cities or institutions they were affiliated with. Hence, the sum of the acknowledgees of countries, cities, and affiliations is slightly higher than the total of individual acknowledgees.

Baldwin, M. C. (2018). Scientific autonomy, public accountability, and the rise of “Peer Review’’ in the cold war United States. Isis, 109(3), 538–558.CrossRef

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Titel: The Social Space of Analytic Philosophy
verfasst von: Eugenio Petrovich
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: A Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-53199-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-53200-9

Copyright-Jahr: 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53200-9_6

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