Tracing the Words of the Analytic Turn in the Journal of Philosophy

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.