On phones, it may be easier to open the poster PDF directly.
On phones, it may be easier to open the poster PDF directly.
Satellite workshop at the conference of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (GAP), 12–13 September, Düsseldorf.
Location: Room 23.21 U1.72, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.
Additional information: https://mnoichl.github.io/data-driven-philosophy-GAP2025/#/section-1
Update 2: The talks of Catherine Herfeld and Adrian Wüthrich have been switched. The change is reflected in the updated programme below.
Update: In this workshop we will rely on Google Colab notebooks. This service is free but requires a Google account, which you can set up in advance. If you already use Google Drive or have a Gmail account, you are all set. If you want to participate without registering for a Google account, you can also use a local Python installation on your own computer. It’s great if you can set this up beforehand, but if you don’t find time for it, we can also figure it out during the workshop.
Organization: Gregor Bös and Max Noichl
Computational methods have revolutionized most fields of academic research, including the humanities. More recently, they have also been put to use in the philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and metaphilosophy. In this satellite workshop, we discuss techniques from the digital humanities, network science, and artificial intelligence that can support the study of philosophical corpora.
The workshop comprises keynote lectures by Prof. Catherine Herfeld and Prof. Adrian Wüthrich that showcase computational methods in philosophical research. After these showcases, Gregor Bös and Max Noichl will assist the participants in developing their own initial research questions that make use of digital methods and explore first implementations. The organizers have prepared templates to support participants without programming experience or who have not yet used computational methods in their research. More experienced participants can use the sessions to exchange ideas and develop their own projects, presenting the state of their progress in the concluding session.
If participants already have project ideas when signing up, we encourage them to get in contact with the organizers to discuss potential data sources and methods. Participants are also very welcome to sign up to continue working on existing digital projects and to contribute to the exchange of approaches.
Duration: 1 ½ days
Expected number of participants: 15–25
Day 1
09:00 – 09:30: Arrival and coffee.
09:30 – 10:00: Introductions and general remarks.
10:00 – 10:45: Keynote by Adrian Wüthrich.
10:45 – 11:15: Discussion of Adrian Wüthrich’s keynote.
11:15 – 11:30: Short break
11:30 – 12:00: Presentation on network visualization in edhiphy by Gregor Bös.
12:00 – 13:30: Lunch break
13:30 – 14:15: Keynote by Catherine Herfeld.
14:15 – 14:45: Discussion of Catherine Herfeld’s keynote.
14:45 – 15:00: Short break
15:00 – 15:30: Presentation on OpenAlex Mapper by Max Noichl.
15:30 – 17:00: Guided walkthrough of state-of-the-art text-analysis notebooks (different difficulties available).
17:00 – 18:00: Brainstorming session, initiating individual and/or group projects.
Day 2
09:00 – 09:30: Arrival and coffee.
09:30 – 12:00: Facilitated project work.
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch break
13:00 – 14:00: Continued project work.
14:00 – 15:00: Project snapshots and farewell.
Knowing the prevailing norm for authorship order matters, because this norm likely shapes how work is perceived. For example, if you and your co-authors decide to list names alphabetically in an environment where most people rank them by contribution, casual readers might assume that a later-alphabet colleague pulled less weight than they actually did. On the other hand, if you ordered by contribution but the resulting list happened to be alphabetical in a field that already leans toward alphabetization, that deliberate choice might be obscured.
Through a project I am working on with Hein Duijf, I have a large dataset of philosophical literature lying around that will allow us to track this. The dataset was created by using the PhilPapers list of philosophy journals, which contains more than a thousand titles, and extracting their corresponding bibliometric data from OpenAlex, resulting in a collection of 1.4 million articles. This dataset is very expansive because PhilPapers adopts a rather liberal approach to classifying journals as philosophy journals. For our purposes, this is beneficial, as co-authored work is likely to occur more frequently at disciplinary borders, where scholars engage in interdisciplinary collaborations.
We can quickly assess how common co-authorship is in philosophy by examining the length of author lists. Figure 1 shows that the vast majority of philosophical articles are single-authored, with a small minority of zero-author contributions. These largely reflect institutionally authored items (letters from editors, published bibliographies, or lists of books received). After filtering out the most egregious entries by manually reviewing the fifty journals with the highest article counts and removing any that clearly fell outside philosophy, our final sample comprises 169,415 articles with more than one author.
All code for this project is available on GitHub, which also includes the complete list of excluded journals.
Now, how do we measure the alphabetization rate in philosophy? It’s more involved than simply counting the papers whose author lists appear in alphabetical order, because other conventions, like randomizing author order or ranking authors by contribution, can also yield alphabetical sequences by accident. We therefore need to adjust the raw alphabetization count by the level of alphabetization expected under chance alone.
Following Waltman (2012), I compute an intentional-alphabetization score for each paper as
\[s = \frac{A - p}{1 - p}\]where \(A=1\) if the published author list is alphabetical and \(A=0\) otherwise, while \(p\) is the probability that the same set of names would appear in alphabetical order by pure chance. Averaging s over all papers in a field yields a field-level index that ranges from 0 to +1, with values near +1 denoting a strong, or total alphabetical norm and values near 0 its absence.
I diverge from Waltman’s analytic approach for \(p\): instead of using the closed-form \(1/n!\) (with \(n\) the number of authors), I estimate \(p\) by repeatedly shuffling each paper’s author list programmatically and recording how often the permutation is alphabetical. This Monte-Carlo procedure introduces negligible extra noise but gracefully handles edge cases such as repeated surnames, which are common among relatives co-authoring and many Asian names.
Figure 2 traces these values over time. A little less than half of the multi-authored articles in our sample appear in alphabetical order. Remembering that most collaborations in philosophy are by two people, we can assume that a good part of these can plausibly be chalked up to chance. The share of deliberately alphabetical ordering (or alphabetization index) is much lower, peaking at about 20 percent in the aughts and drifting down into the 10–15 percent range in recent years. Taken together, these numbers indicate that philosophy lacks a robust convention of alphabetical co-authorship, and that the little intentional alphabetical ordering that once existed has been shrinking.
How do these results look when we compare different journals? For a first look, I took the list of top journals proposed by De Bruin (2023). The resulting average intentional-alphabetization values, together with bootstrapped confidence intervals are shown in Figure 3. For my own interest, I also included two philosophy-of-science journals. Note that Ergo is absent from the dataset and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society is excluded because the dataset contained only two co-authored papers. As I am mostly interested here in contemporary conventions, I also included only papers from the last fifteen years.
We note considerable variation in intentional alphabetical ordering among philosophy journals. The highest level of intentional alphabetization is found in the Journal of Philosophy with around 60%. The average intentional alphabetization rate among all of these journals is roughly 40%.
This aligns with the 38.8% Waltman reports for the Web of Science “Philosophy” category for the years 2007–2011. The value is far lower than that for mathematics (73.3%), finance (68.3%) and particle physics (56.7%), but noticeably higher than those typical of other humanities like history (29.9%) or linguistics (15.6%). It is also considerably higher than the global average we found in our data shown in Figure 2. While it seems like Waltman appears to have observed alphabetical ordering in philosophy essentially at its peak with his sample, there is still a roughly 18 percentage point difference. I couldn’t reconstruct Waltman’s sample, as I don’t have access to what the Web of Science category of philosophy contained thirteen years ago, but I suspect that it took a relatively narrow view of philosophy. E.g., it separates out history and philosophy of science as a separate category (18.5%).
To investigate which sorts of journals shift the average up or down in our sample (and therefore might explain this discrepancy), I extracted those with the highest and lowest alphabetization values over the past fifteen years. The plot displays only journals with more than 100 data points. I also removed every journal whose mean alphabetization value falls below zero; such a negative score signals that the papers in the journal systematically resist alphabetical authorship ordering. Closer inspection suggests that this pattern usually arises because a single person appears as co-author on many, or most, of the articles. This could be an intentional and somewhat worrisome editorial practice, or merely a coding error in how editors were recorded in the database.
We see that the highest-scoring journals are basically logic and mathematics-venues, (and Ethics for reasons that I couldn’t determine.) so it is no surprise that they follow alphabetical conventions. Several other leading philosophy journals end up in the 40%–60% range of intentional alphabetical authorship ordering. At the bottom sit journals with almost no deliberate alphabetical ordering. Here we see a lot of medicine and nursing ethics, as well as a number of non-English journals. I also suspect that less analytical outlets tend towards less alphabetical ordering. Overall, I suspect that both the highest and lowest amounts of alphabetical ordering in our sample of philosophy are imported from the bordering disciplines in which philosophers author as well.
While reviewing the original journal ranking, it appeared to me that the more prominent journals seemed likelier to adopt alphabetical authorship. I ran a quick regression (weighted by number of articles in each journal) using De Bruin’s awareness-adjusted quality score. This score is derived from a survey in which philosophers rated journals for quality and reported how familiar they were with them, which taken together should yield a reasonable proxy for prominence.
The models suggest that there is a weak relationship. We explain only about 12% of the variance (and therefore would fare very badly trying to predict alphabetization rates from journal rank alone). But higher-ranked journals still show measurably more intentional alphabetization \(r(36)=.34,\,p=.036,\,R^{2}=.12\). The model predicts 25 percentage points more intentional alphabetization in the top-rated journals than in the lowest-rated ones.
Why? One thought is that top Anglophone journals tilt toward formal work and so quietly import authorship norms from formal disciplines. Another is that authorship-order disputes are less lenient in high-impact venues; collaborators may therefore converge on external, low-friction conventions.
So, where does that leave us? We have seen, contemporary philosophy lacks a strong, field-wide convention of alphabetical ordering, and the limited practice that does exist appears to be disappearing in recent years. Alphabetization is somewhat more common in formal, high-impact venues, yet even there intentional alphabetical ordering reaches only about 40–60 percent. Casual readers, therefore, cannot be expected to infer that an alphabetical byline reflects a deliberate choice rather than some other dynamic, especially if they usually read work from throughout the discipline. In the most formal subfields, alphabetization may work well as a choice, because the conventions are comparatively robust. By contrast, in areas such as history and philosophy of science, or in applied ethics, it seems unlikely that it is reliably interpreted.
Note on the use of generative AI: a lot of the code for this analysis was produced using OpenAI’s o3 model. The text of this blog post was dictated to MacWhisper and edited afterwards. Depending on your general view of my work, you may adjust your estimate of the results’ quality upward or downward accordingly.
]]>Whether or not to count 1/8 th of an ostrich egg as equivalent to one chicken egg (for the purpose of making ‘One-Bowl Brownies’) is not implicit in the instruction ‘add three eggs’.
A cabbit is allegedly the product of crossbreeding. (I say allegedly because some have claimed the cabbit is, in fact, a physically altered Manx cat.) Take a rabbit ovum, fertilize it in vitro with feline sperm, and implant the fertilized egg in a fecund female rabbit and, with a little patience and far too much federal grant money, one is able to produce a cabbit. “I do not know why you would want one,” writes Stout, for the cabbit is a rather disturbing creature. Featuring the hindquarters of a rabbit, replete with hopping legs and bushy tail, and the head of a cat, the cabbit is what can only be called an “abomination.”
Who murdered Eggs Benedict? Was it Beef Strogonoff? Was it Chicken Cacciatore? Where was Eggs Benedict murdered? Was it in the Bronx? When? At 2:00 A. M. January 24, 1963? Why? Did he squeal? How? With this knife?
Let us take the case of an animal which has all the regular characteristics of a cat except that it alternately gives birth to kittens and lays eggs. Shall we still call this animal a cat?
For instance, it may very well happen that certain individuals, e.g. certain stones or leaves, turn out to be both reddish and greenish, while others, e.g. sand dunes or egg yolks, are not classified at all. In that case, it is recommended that two things be done: (1) introducing a new colour predicate ‘ yellow ‘ by ostensive definition, say with ripe lemons and dunes as paradigms, and (2) extending and stabilizing (1) by setting up the rule ‘ reddish, greenish => yellow’ (if reddish as well as greenish hold of something, yellow, too, shall hold of that same thing).
A drawing of an egg would, if reference to Lord Snow were established, be a perfectly legitimate caricature of him.
The universe e.g. was made out of the cosmic egg, floating in the primeval waters-another symbol of fertility and probably even sexual energy; or it was begotten by an ancestral couple, usually heaven and earth.
(a) Upon observing a single platypus (I’ll call her Paula) lay eggs, we infer that all (female) platypuses lay eggs.
In other words, our is chickens are necessarily informed by ought eggs.
