Abstract
We carried out a quantitative analysis of the twentieth-century philosophical lexicon, based on corpora drawn from a leading US philosophical review, the Journal of Philosophy. In the chapter, we present and discuss some findings of ours, with special regard to analytic philosophy, a contemporary philosophical tradition that plays a leading role in the English-speaking world. More specifically, we present some results that are relevant to the process of rise to dominance of analytic philosophy in the USA—a process that we call “analytic turn”. In a nutshell, we found that the lexicon related to topics that are characteristic of (half-of-the-century) analytic philosophy, such as semantics, logic and epistemology, underwent a significant gain in importance within the Journal of Philosophy during the three post-Second War decades. We also observed a corresponding decrease in importance of the lexicon related to non-English speaking, “continental” philosophy, and to themes of generic human and social interest. We also found that the turning point in both processes can be approximately located between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s. Although we shall discuss reasons to be cautious in drawing conclusions about the history of philosophy from lexical data concerning philosophical journals, these and other results of ours suggest a picture of the analytic turn that is at odds with some commonplace opinion among analytic philosophers.
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Notes
- 1.
However, it appears that during the twentieth century philosophical journals underwent a less marked process of lexicon specialization than journals belonging to other fields of inquiry, such as sociology, statistics, and psychology (see Chap.11).
- 2.
http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405106795_chunk_g97814051067952#citation. Accessed March 13, 2018.
- 3.
As found in the site of the Journal, http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/generalinfo.html. Accessed March 13, 2018.
- 4.
When we speak of “editor”, we always mean full editor, as opposed, e.g. to consulting editor, or managing editor, or book-review editor, and so on.
- 5.
We obtained information about the editors’ panel directly from the list of editors published in the Front matter section of each issue of the Journal.
- 6.
For a more detailed introduction to topic analysis, see Sbalchiero and Tuzzi (2016).
- 7.
By a thematic distinction, we mean a distinction concerning the theme a given form is related to. For instance, “art”, “aesthetic”, and “poetry” are all words related to aesthetically relevant topics. By a functional distinction, we mean a distinction concerning the role of forms within the corpus. For instance, in the Journal, words for concrete actions and things such as like “kill”, “shoot”, “eye”, and “arm” are typically used to offer concrete examples.
- 8.
Katzav (2018) explicitly hypothesizes a connection between the composition of the editors’ panel and the publication policy of the Journal.
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Spolaore, G., Giaretta, P. (2018). Tracing the Words of the Analytic Turn in the Journal of Philosophy. In: Tuzzi, A. (eds) Tracing the Life Cycle of Ideas in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97064-6_2
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