Abstract
Traditionally, logic has been the dominant formal method within philosophy. Are logical methods still dominant today, or have the types of formal methods used in philosophy changed in recent times? To address this question, we coded a sample of philosophy papers from the late 2000s and from the late 2010s for the formal methods they used. The results indicate that (a) the proportion of papers using logical methods remained more or less constant over that time period but (b) the proportion of papers using probabilistic methods was approximately three times higher in the late 2010s than it was in the late 2000s. Further analyses explored this change by looking more closely at specific methods, specific levels of technical engagement, and specific subdisciplines within philosophy. These analyses indicate that the increasing proportion of papers using probabilistic methods was pervasive, not confined to particular probabilistic methods, levels of sophistication, or subdisciplines.
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Data is available at the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM): https://hdl.handle.net/11299/225224.
Notes
They selected The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, The Philosophical Review, The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, so the corpus they investigate is distinct from the one we investigate.
They did record whether articles have logic as their primary subject matter, although this is just one of the ten subdisciplines we consider, as mentioned above.
These were the articles from the first six of twelve issues, with three exceptions of articles from those issues which not all team members rated. This kappa score includes the the screening ratings from the graduate student team member, whose participation we describe at the end of the following paragraph. See footnote 6 and the discussion surrounding it for more on conceptions of interrater reliability.
The method of “set theory & relations” includes the general mathematical treatment of functions, n-tuples, and relations, as well as order and lattice theory.
“Level” classification lends itself to two types of treatment. As a single, 4-level, ordinal variable, interrater reliability for the “Level” classification can be straightforwardly calculated using Spearman’s \(\rho \) (Sheskin 2011, sec. 29). However, the zero-versus-nonzero split was always interpreted with special significance. We saw two questions in this variable: (i) “Was a formal method used?” and (ii) “With what degree of sophistication was a formal method used when it was used?” Correspondingly, then, one might be interested in the reliabilities for those two decisions: (i) A nominal decision to classify an article as level 0 versus one of the upper levels, and (ii) an ordinal decision about which level to assign to an article that is not level 0.
For more on the methods of binary and multinomial logistic regression used in our analyses, see, e.g., Hosmer et al. (2013).
For more on McNemar’s exact test of marginal homogeneity, see, e.g., Sheskin (2011, sec. 20).
In the earlier time period, there were only two papers in action theory that used formal methods, both in the logic family. By contrast, in the more recent time period, out of the seven papers using formal methods, we find five of them using methods in the probability family. Three of those used experimental methods.
Of the two articles in philosophy of mind in the later time period that used methods from the probability family, one used experimental methods from cognitive science and the other synthesized other reports of the results of applying such experimental methods.
The exception to this seems to be articles that used statistics, which admit of many fewer borderline cases and are quite distinctive from other methods.
By comparison, the International Committee of Medical Journal (ICMJ) Editors decided in 2004 to make clinical trial preregistration a precondition for publication in ICMJ journals, following developing laws mandating the same for certain clinical trials funded by public grants (DeAngelis et al. 2005, 2004).
As expressed, for example, by Michael Dummett (1978, p. 458), who claimed that the goal of analytic philosophy was to analyze the structure of thought, as opposed to the psychological process of thinking, by applying logic to the analysis of language.
Intriguingly, Malaterre, Chartier, and Pulizzotto (2019) provide evidence for a similar change in the philosophy of science in the 1980s. So, whatever it is that is happening in so many areas of philosophy over the past decade or so, it is possible that it is similar to what happened in philosophy of science around thirty to forty years ago.
Methods from the digital humanities have only made limited inroads in philosophy. In Sect. 1, we discussed some examples that use topic modeling. See also Buckner, Niepert, and Allen (2011) for an approach to creating a computational “ontology” for philosophy—a kind of automated map of the structure and relations of concepts in a domain.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Minnesota screening team—Kelly Adams, Weisang Chen, Femke Kuiling, Devin Lightheart, Marie Lundgren, and Sonja Zbinden—for their indispensible work to create our data set, and two reviewers for comments that helped improve the clarity and accessibility of our conclusions.
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SCF acknowledges support from the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Minnesota.
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code for the data analysis is available at the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM): https://hdl.handle.net/11299/225224.
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This article belongs to the topical collection “Metaphilosophy of Formal Methods”, edited by Samuel C. Fletcher.
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Fletcher, S.C., Knobe, J., Wheeler, G. et al. Changing use of formal methods in philosophy: late 2000s vs. late 2010s. Synthese 199, 14555–14576 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03433-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03433-9