Abstract
Various authors have recently argued that certain parts of academic philosophy are highly isolated from other fields of academic research. The central aim of this paper is to go beyond philosophical arguments, and empirically test whether this is indeed the case. More specifically, we investigate whether LEMM (Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Mind and Metaphysics) is more isolated than Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Theory. To do this, we collected 2369 Web of Science indexed papers divided into 17 PhilPapers topics from these three subfields of philosophy, and used 10 indicators to measure their isolation. The results showed that the topics from LEMM were more isolated from other fields of science than the topics from Value Theory and Philosophy of Science. Within philosophy, however, the topics from LEMM generally seemed as well-connected as Philosophy of Science and Value Theory.
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Notes
We say ‘may be misdirected’ as broad relevance (and lack of isolation) is just one way in which philosophical research can be valuable. Some would argue that even philosophy that is highly isolated can be highly valuable in other ways, and we do not mean to argue against this here.
Note that Kitcher particularly seems to refer to philosophy of special sciences and philosophy of scientific practice as less isolated than LEMM. As we will see below, this study confirms there are good reasons to distinguish between more 'general' and more 'applied' PoS: parts of what is known as Philosophy of Science seem to be as isolated as LEMM.
https://PhilPapers.org/browse/all, accessed on 19, June, 2020.
Of course, the borders between these subfields are often unclear, and many papers could be part of more than one of them. For the purpose of this study, however, we ignore this problem.
We did not include any topics from the category 'Continental Philosophy' because work from this subfield is not well covered in Web of Science and PhilPapers. Thus, the results of this study apply only to 'analytic' philosophy.
‘Biodiversity’ (42.2%) was replaced by ‘ Species’ (48.9%); ‘Incommensurability in science’ (32.5%) was replaced by ‘Theory change’ (46.2%); ‘Immigration’ (25.3%) was replaced by ‘Animal rights’ (30.7%). Because coverage was generally lower in topics from VT, not all topics selected from that field to replace topics with low coverage actually had higher coverage. In those cases, we kept the original topics.
Over the course of 7 years, the ECOOM algorithm has automatically matched several hundred-thousands of references to WoS records with a 85%-90% rate of correct matching. The algorithm further suggests appropriate matches for the remaining 10–15% of false negative matches, which were manually validated to be 70% correct.
Source items are “articles appearing in journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in one of its three main indexes – Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI)” ( Butler & Visser, 2006, p. 330).
Of course, the distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers are sometimes vague, and one researcher can plausibly fit in both categories; however, we ignore these complications for the purposes of this study and assume that researchers are either philosopher or non-philosopher, and that this is reliably indicated by their affiliation.
The average number of authors per paper is 2.5857, with 971 unique authors combined for all multi-authored papers. The topic ‘Rape and sexual violence’ has the highest number of authors, namely, 3.2621.
WoS coverage of references is around 25.8% for the 17 topics. The topic ‘Functions’ has the highest share of WoS indexed references (37%,) while the topic ‘Rape and sexual violence’ has the lowest ratio (17.9%). Among the three subfields of philosophy, ‘Philosophy of Science’ has highest ratio of indexed references (28.6%), followed by ‘Core Philosophy’ (26.3%) and ‘Philosophy of Value Issues’ (21.5%).
It is also important to keep in mind that the isolation of philosophical research says nothing about the technical quality of the research. That is, these results should not be taken to imply that philosophical research from PoS and VT is superior in terms of analysis, reasoning or argumentation. Instead, PoS and VT show to be superior in terms of their relevance for other academic research.
For example, the 2020 ESI Field Baselines published by Clarivate reports that during the period 2010 to 2020 WoS papers in Social Sciences, General were cited 7.82 times on average while the papers in Physics were cited 11.9 times on average. https://esi.clarivate.com/, accessed on 9, October, 2020.
The latter two exclusions were only initiated when there are on any above characters shown in other part of the address.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Wouter Jeuris for conducting the WoS matching process for the bibliographic records downloaded from PhilPapers. Stijn Conix gratefully acknowledges funding from the Research Council -- Flanders, Grant No. 3H200026.
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Appendices
Appendix A. Criteria of selecting analysed research topics
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1.
To ensure the quality of classification, we selected only research topics that have an active editor in PhilPapers.
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2.
To ensure that statistical analysis is meaningful, we selected only research topics with at least 150 documents published since 1998.
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3.
To ensure that the topics are devoted to a single research question, we excluded all topics of which the name indicates that they are heterogeneous, e.g. if they have ‘miscellaneous’ in their name.
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4.
To ensure that we could test the hypotheses outlined above, we selected topics from philosophy of science, philosophy of societal issues, and core philosophy. Philosophy of science-topics were selected from the following PhilPapers Areas: ‘Philosophy of Biology’, ‘Philosophy of the Physical sciences’, and ‘General Philosophy of Science’. Philosophy of societal issue-topics were selected from the following Philpapers Areas: ‘Applied Ethics’, ‘Meta-Ethics’, ‘Normative Ethics’, ‘Philosophy of Race, Gender, and Sexuality’, and ‘Social and Political Philosophy’. Core philosophy topics were selected from the following Areas: ‘Epistemology’, ‘Metaphysics’, ‘Philosophy of Language’, ‘Philosophy of Mind’. Within philosophy of science and societal issues, these areas were selected to include both topics close to core philosophy (e.g. meta-ethics) and topics further removed from it (e.g. applied ethics).
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5.
To ensure that we could test the hypotheses, we excluded topics that fall clearly in more than one of the three main philosophical areas. For example, topics that concern research integrity were excluded, and we did not select topics from ‘philosophy of the cognitive sciences’ to avoid overlap with ‘philosophy of mind’.
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6.
To avoid overlap between topics, we avoided selecting two topics that are closely related. For example, we did not select both ‘Teleology’ and ‘Functions’ for philosophy of biology.
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7.
To ensure relatively wide coverage of the whole of analytic philosophy, we selected 6 topics from philosophy of science, 6 topics from philosophy of societal issues, and 5 topics from core philosophy.
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8.
Whenever the decision was not determined by other criteria, we ranked topics by the number of documents they contain.
Appendix B. Detailed overview of ten isolation indicators applied in this study
B-1. Disciplinary isolation (FIS Disc , FIM Disc , BIS Disc , BIM Disc, CIS Disc)
B-1–1. Forward-looking isolation
Forward-looking relative isolation: What proportion of a topic’s philosophical citations is from papers in the topic?
To investigate the extent to which topics are isolated from other philosophical research, we measure the ratio of philosophical papers in the topic citing the papers in the topic to all philosophical papers citing the papers in the topic as equation \({{\varvec{F}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{S}}}_{{\varvec{D}}{\varvec{i}}{\varvec{s}}{\varvec{c}}}=\frac{{{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{P}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{p}}}}{{{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}}\), where \({C}_{P}\) is the total number of philosophical papers citing the papers in the topic, and \({C}_{Ptp}\) is the number of philosophical citations of those papers from papers in the same topic.
Forward-looking absolute impact: How often, on average, are the papers of a topic cited by philosophical papers outside the topic?
We measure the extent to which a topic impacts philosophical work outside the topic by the ratio of the times the papers in a topic are cited by philosophical papers from outside the topic to the total number of the papers in the topic as equation \({{\varvec{F}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{M}}}_{{\varvec{D}}{\varvec{i}}{\varvec{s}}{\varvec{c}}}=\frac{{{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}-{{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{P}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{p}}}\boldsymbol{ }}{{{\varvec{N}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}}\), where \({C}_{P}\) is the total number of philosophical papers citing the papers in a topic,\({C}_{Ptp}\) is the number of citations of those papers from philosophical papers in the same topic, and \({N}_{T}\) is the total number of papers in the topic.
B-1–2. Backward-looking isolation
Backward-looking relative isolation: What proportion of a topic’s philosophical references refers to papers in the same topic?
This indicator focuses on a topic’s references to philosophical papers. We calculate the ratio of the times the papers in a topic cite philosophical papers in the topic to the total number of philosophical references of papers in the topic as equation \({{\varvec{B}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{S}}}_{{\varvec{D}}{\varvec{i}}{\varvec{s}}{\varvec{c}}}=\frac{{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{P}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{p}}}}{{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}}\), where \({R}_{P}\) is the total number of philosophical references of the papers in the topic, and \({R}_{Ptp}\) is the number of philosophical references from the same topic.
Backward-looking absolute impact: How often, on average, are the papers of a topic citing philosophical papers outside the topic?
This indicator measures the extent to which a topic cites philosophical work outside the topic by the ratio of the times the papers in a topic citing philosophical papers from outside the topic to the total number of the papers in the topic as equation \({{\varvec{B}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{M}}}_{{\varvec{D}}{\varvec{i}}{\varvec{s}}{\varvec{c}}}=\frac{{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}-{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{P}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{p}}}\boldsymbol{ }}{{{\varvec{N}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}}\), where \({R}_{P}\) is the total number of philosophical references of the papers in a topic,\({R}_{Ptp}\) is the number of philosophical references from the same topic, and \({N}_{T}\) is the total number of papers in the topic.
B-1–3. Collaborative isolation
Collaborative isolation: What proportion of papers are NOT co-authored only with philosophers?
To measure the isolation degree of collaboration with philosophers in the field, we investigate how often the philosophers of a topic not collaborate with only philosophers. To do this, we measure the ratio of the number of the papers in a topic published by at least two philosophers to the total number of papers as equation
\({{\varvec{C}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{S}}}_{{\varvec{D}}{\varvec{i}}{\varvec{s}}{\varvec{c}}}=\frac{{{N}_{T}-N}_{Cp}}{{N}_{T}}\), where \({N}_{T}\) is the total number of papers in a topic, and \({N}_{Cp}\) is the number of papers in that topic co-published by at least two philosophers.
B-2. Interdisciplinary isolation (FIS Inter , FIM Inter , BIS Inter , BIM Inter, CIS Inter)
B-2–1. Forward-looking isolation
Forward-looking relative isolation: What proportion of a topic’s citations is from papers in philosophy?
We measure the ratio of the times the papers in a topic are cited by papers in philosophy to the total number of citations of the papers in the topic as formula \({{\varvec{F}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{S}}}_{{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{n}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{e}}{\varvec{r}}}=\frac{{{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}}{{{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}}\), where \({C}_{T}\) is the total number of citations of the topic, and \({C}_{P}\) is the number of philosophical papers citing those WoS papers.
Forward-looking absolute impact: How often, on average, are papers in a topic cited by papers from outside the field?
We measure the ratio of the times the papers in a topic are cited by non-philosophical papers to the total number of the papers by the equation \({{\varvec{F}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{M}}}_{{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{n}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{e}}{\varvec{r}}}=\frac{{{{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}-{\varvec{C}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}}{{{\varvec{N}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}}\), where \({C}_{T}\) is the total number of citations of the topic,\({C}_{P}\) is the number of papers from philosophy citing the topic and \({N}_{T}\) is the total number of papers in the topic.
B-2–2. Backward-looking isolation
Backward -looking relative isolation: What proportion of a topic’s references refers to papers in philosophy?
We measure the ratio of the times the papers in a topic cite papers in philosophy to the total number of references of all papers in the topic as equation \({{\varvec{B}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{S}}}_{{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{n}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{e}}{\varvec{r}}}=\frac{{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}}{{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}}\), where \({R}_{T}\) is the total number of references in a topic, and \({R}_{P}\) is the number of references of the topic to philosophical papers.
Backward-looking absolute impact: How often, on average, are the papers of a topic citing papers outside the field?
This indicator measures the extent to which a topic cites papers outside philosophy by the ratio of the times the papers in a topic citing papers from outside the field to the total number of the papers in the topic as equation \({{\varvec{B}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{M}}}_{{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{n}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{e}}{\varvec{r}}}=\frac{{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}-{{\varvec{R}}}_{{\varvec{P}}}\boldsymbol{ }}{{{\varvec{N}}}_{{\varvec{T}}}}\), where \({R}_{T}\) is the total number of references of the papers in a topic,\({R}_{P}\) is the number of philosophical references, and \({N}_{T}\) is the total number of papers in the topic.
B-2–3. Collaborative isolation
Collaborative isolation: What proportion of papers are NOT co-authored with non-philosophers?
We investigate how often the philosophers of a topic collaborate with non-philosophers and then reverse the perspective to correspond the implication of other indicators: the higher the value, the higher the isolation degree. To do this, we measure the ratio of the number of the papers in a topic published by at least one philosopher and one non-philosopher to the total number of papers and deduct them as equation.
\({{\varvec{C}}{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{S}}}_{{\varvec{I}}{\varvec{n}}{\varvec{t}}{\varvec{e}}{\varvec{r}}}=\frac{{N}_{T}-{N}_{C}}{{N}_{T}}\), where \({N}_{T}\) is the total number of papers in a topic, and \({N}_{C}\) is the number of papers in that topic co-published by at least one philosopher and one non-philosopher. Note that the collaborations between only philosophers or only non-philosophers are not included in \({N}_{C}\).
Appendix C. Principles to distinguish philosophers on the basis of their corresponding addresses
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1.
Identify all the authors from addresses that contain "PHIL", "FILO", "Pholosoph" or "ETH" (excluding "Method", country "Netherlands", and university "ETH")Footnote 17 as philosophers.
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2.
Manually check and identify the authors with addresses showing only the main institution/university names without further department information.
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3.
Use the philosopher list collected from Step 1 and 2 to exclude the author names which were already known as philosophers.
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4.
Collect a keyword list of department names (see Appendix B.1) which are clearly not philosophical institutions from the result of Step 3, and identify the authors with these addresses as non-philosophers.
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5.
Manually check the authors of the remaining 31 papers by their affiliation addresses.
C-1. Keywords for detecting non-philosophic addresses
'%Behav %' OR '%Evolutionsbiol%' OR '%Weather%' OR '%Anim Prod Syst%' OR '%Indigenous Knowledges%' OR '%Sustainabil%' OR '%Neurosci%' OR '%Informat Sci%' OR '%Policy%' OR '%Climate Sci%' OR '%Comparat%' OR '%Conservat Genet'' OR '%Gender%' OR '%Social Care' OR '%Law%' OR '%Invest%' OR '%Media%' OR '%Mediterraneenne%' OR '%Latin%' OR '%Citizenship%' OR '%Urban%' OR '%Accounting%' OR '%Business%' OR '%Basic Sci%' OR '%Biol%' OR '%Commun%' OR '%Soil Sci%' OR '%Dev Sociol%' OR '%Earth%' OR '%Engn%' OR '%Environm%' OR '%Oncol%' OR '%Fis %' OR '%Geol%' OR '%Interact%' OR '%Manage%' OR '%Mat Sci%' OR '%Matemat%' OR '%Commun%' OR '%Mkt%' OR '%Obstet%' OR '%Organism%' OR '%Paediat%' OR '%Geosyst%' OR '%Probabil%' OR '%Psychol%' OR '%Publ Hlth%' OR '%Technol%' OR '%Semiot%' OR '%Sociol%' OR '%Social%' OR '%Zool%' OR '%Sci Fis%' OR '%Sociol%' OR '%Global%' OR '%Polytech%' OR '%Vet Med%' OR '%Hlth%' OR '%Math%' OR '%Brain%' OR '%Chem%' OR '%Coastal%' OR '%Marine%' OR '%Languages%' OR '%Quantum%' OR '%Theoret%' OR '%Transcultural%' OR '%Psycholinguist%' OR '%Nucl%' OR '%Polit%' OR '%Psychiat%' OR '%Neurosci%' OR '%Prevent%' OR '%Physiol%' OR '%Conservat%' OR '%Geosci%' OR '%Agr%' OR '%Mol %' OR '%Disabil%' OR '%Modeling%' OR '%Life%' OR '%IBISC%' OR '%CONICET%' OR '%Review%' OR '%Sch Econ%'.
Appendix D. Values of all the isolation indicators of 17 topics in three subfields of philosophy (2000–2017)
Topic | Disciplinary | Interdisciplinary | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Forward-looking isolation | Forward-looking absolute citations | Backward-looking isolation | Backward-looking absolute references | Collaborative isolation | Forward-looking isolation | Forward-looking absolute citations | Backward-looking isolation | Backward-looking absolute references | Collaborative isolation | ||
Philosophy of Science | 17.3% | 3.41 | 19.1% | 2.87 | 92.8% | 37.4% | 6.90 | 33.8% | 6.95 | 95.7% | |
General PoS | Theory change | 13.9% | 2.73 | 10.5% | 3.76 | 92.4% | 79.8% | 0.80 | 71.8% | 1.65 | 98.5% |
The nature of models | 12.8% | 7.52 | 18.9% | 4.64 | 90.6% | 71.8% | 3.38 | 56.6% | 4.38 | 94.9% | |
Applied PoS | Functions | 22.4% | 4.12 | 21.3% | 5.11 | 81.3% | 50.8% | 5.14 | 45.6% | 7.75 | 96.7% |
Mathematical structure of Quantum Mechanics | 1.7% | 1.58 | 1.6% | 0.82 | 95.9% | 24.1% | 5.07 | 10.1% | 7.41 | 95.3% | |
Species | 28.1% | 3.08 | 25.2% | 2.94 | 95.5% | 19.7% | 17.43 | 27.2% | 10.55 | 95.5% | |
Symmetry in physics | 17.3% | 1.59 | 17.7% | 1.39 | 95.9% | 29.3% | 4.64 | 19.6% | 6.97 | 95.2% | |
Philosophy of Value Theory | 31.4% | 1.61 | 26.7% | 1.84 | 94.2% | 60.2% | 1.55 | 49.9% | 2.53 | 96.3% | |
General VT | Moral expressivism | 46.1% | 2.15 | 32.0% | 3.55 | 92.6% | 90.3% | 0.43 | 88.2% | 0.70 | 99.5% |
The doctrine of dual effect | 34.5% | 1.81 | 26.8% | 2.37 | 95.6% | 74.1% | 0.97 | 59.1% | 2.24 | 96.7% | |
Applied VT | Abortion | 19.8% | 1.73 | 24.2% | 1.29 | 95.4% | 52.7% | 1.93 | 41.2% | 2.44 | 94.5% |
Animal rights | 15.6% | 0.86 | 14.7% | 0.79 | 97.0% | 33.6% | 2.02 | 18.9% | 3.96 | 94.7% | |
Moral status of animals | 12.8% | 2.48 | 13.4% | 2.10 | 83.8% | 69.2% | 1.26 | 53.3% | 2.13 | 97.5% | |
Rape and sexual violence | 23.4% | 0.42 | 21.3% | 0.44 | 97.6% | 14.9% | 3.16 | 10.0% | 5.00 | 95.3% | |
LEMM | 42.7% | 2.60 | 32.3% | 3.83 | 90.8% | 92.4% | 0.37 | 93.0% | 0.43 | 99.6% | |
Closure of knowledge | 31.1% | 2.20 | 17.7% | 4.09 | 89.1% | 94.5% | 0.18 | 88.2% | 0.66 | 98.9% | |
Minimalism and deflationism about truth | 42.4% | 1.27 | 16.9% | 4.03 | 90.9% | 93.1% | 0.16 | 95.1% | 0.25 | 100.0% | |
The exclusion problem | 41.8% | 3.71 | 36.3% | 4.58 | 92.0% | 91.0% | 0.63 | 94.7% | 0.40 | 100.0% | |
Truthmakers | 50.3% | 2.83 | 46.7% | 3.01 | 90.0% | 97.2% | 0.17 | 98.1% | 0.11 | 99.1% | |
Zombies and the conceivability argument | 23.9% | 2.39 | 18.0% | 3.57 | 92.1% | 78.0% | 0.89 | 75.8% | 1.39 | 100.0% | |
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Chi, PS., Conix, S. Measuring the isolation of research topics in philosophy. Scientometrics 127, 1669–1696 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04276-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04276-y