Abstract
Knowledge systems, including analytic philosophy, can be modeled as multi-layer networks comprising three layers: the semantic, the semiotic, and the social. In this chapter, we show how, by leveraging the information contained in the acknowledgments, we can successfully investigate the social layer of recent analytic philosophy. In the first part of the chapter, network analysis is used to reconstruct the sociological fine-grained structure of the discipline. Different types of philosophers are distinguished based on their position in the social network, and a core and a periphery are individuated. In the second part of the chapter, citations and acknowledgments are combined to investigate the interface between the semantic and the social layers. Socio-epistemic communities are identified and the overlap between the social and epistemic influence of analytic philosophers is assessed.
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Notes
- 1.
In network analytic terms, this indicator is nothing else than the average in-degree of publication nodes in the Author-Publication network.
- 2.
The simple out-degree, by contrast, represents the number of distinct acknowledgees mentioned by the author in their oeuvre, where, by oeuvre, we mean all the publications (co-)authored by the author. To be precise, the weighted out-degree is the sum of the fractional acknowledgments and hence can take non-integer values. The three out-degree measures, however, are highly correlated and, thus, it makes no difference to use one or another. For the sake of simplicity, we prefer not to use the fractional sum but the simple sum, ignoring the fractionalization due to co-authorship. In the toy example, this means that we will set the weight of the link \(R_1 \rightarrow R_6\) at 2 instead of 1.5.
- 3.
As before, the simple in-degree represents the number of distinct authors mentioning an acknowledgee whereas the weighted in-degree should be, to be precise, the sum of the fractional mentions. Again, since the three measures are highly correlated we will use, for the sake of simplicity, the non-fractional mentions, which are integers and have a more intuitive interpretation than their fractional version.
- 4.
When the two statistics are equal, we consider the researcher a Giver.
- 5.
Note that the model was estimated only considering the 1077 acknowledgees that write at least 1 paper as authors, to avoid that the 4,650 “pure” acknowledgees, for which the ratio is equal to 0 by definition, distort the results. Neither the “pure” 314 authors could be included in the model because, for them, the ratio is equal to infinity as the denominator of the ratio is 0.
- 6.
The most striking case is a researcher who authors 8 papers and gives 96 acknowledgments but is never mentioned by another author in the corpus.
- 7.
It must be noted that, in addition to next-gen analytic philosophers, the light-blue cluster contains also a few senior analytic philosophers who do not reciprocate mentions. This may happen because they ceased their publication activity or are no longer interested in publishing in the five journals.
- 8.
When a philosopher was affiliated with more than one institution or country, it was attributed to all the institutions and countries of affiliation. Note that for a high portion of philosophers, especially those in the Next-Gen core that include many researchers with just one mention, it was not possible to attribute an affiliation or a country. These data should then be taken with some caution.
- 9.
Around one-third of these articles, however, mention no acknowledgee at all.
- 10.
Including also minor 1-paper communities, i.e., isolated papers, the ACN and the BCN count 13 and 55 communities, respectively.
- 11.
The titles and the partition can be found in the Supplementary Materials.
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Petrovich, E. (2024). Socio-Epistemic Communities in Analytic Philosophy. In: A Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy . Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53200-9_7
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