A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), "A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind" (Synthese 2023).

Karen Yan

What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. 

We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosophy of interdisciplinarity. With this integrated method, we produced a set of systematic and empirical descriptions of types of cross-disciplinarity in EIPM: Encyclopedic multi-disciplinarity (MD), Contextualizing MD, Empirical interdisciplinarity (ID), Methodological ID, and Theoretical ID. The following table summarizes the key features of each type:

 

Our analyses show that Contextualizing MD, Encyclopedic MD, and Theoretical ID are the most prominent types of cross-disciplinarity in EIPM. With our robust empirical description of EIPM, we then metaphilosophically evaluate how EIPM philosophers incorporate empirical evidence into their work. We focus on Contextualizing MD and Theoretical ID because Encyclopedic MD is a typical citing practice for literature reviews, introductions, or tangential points. 

For the articles under the category of Contextualizing MD, we picked two subsets from our dataset to analyze further. We found that EIPM philosophers citing original research articles are more likely to respect the original epistemic context in which evidence is produced by noting the relevant controversy or debate. By contrast, EIPM philosophers citing review or theoretical articles are more likely to misuse the original epistemic context of the relevant evidence they rely on. We then suggest using the following metaphilosophical norms to improve the quality-control procedure for conducting EIPM: 

(1) Research about whether the targeted article is under debate or not

(2) Note clearly how much epistemic weight one gives to this piece of evidence in one’s philosophical reasoning

(3) Justify why the chosen epistemic weight is adequate on both empirical and philosophical grounds. 

Another important metaphilosophical lesson concerns EIPM philosophers’ epistemic role or identity as philosophers. We have observed that most EIPM philosophers under the Theoretical ID category are not developing their own large-scale unifying philosophical theories. Their roles are more like theory-tinkerers, i.e., tinkering with scientific theories proposed by leading scientists. Moreover, their tinkering work can be roughly categorized into three types: 

1. revise a scientific theory given some philosophical concerns or some philosophical interpretation of the theory that the EIPM philosopher offers
2. object to some part of the theory and propose an alternative, and 
3. extend or apply the theory to account for something new. 

Our observation about EIPM philosophers’ epistemic role as theory-tinkerers offers an alternative interpretation to Irvine’s (2014) criticism of EIPM. 

However, EIPM philosophers, as theory-tinkerers, face the following metaphilosophical challenge. What theoretical virtues should philosophers aim for when tinkering with scientific theories? Presumably, there are many: predictive power, descriptive power, explanatory power, empirical testability, quantifiability, computability, simplicity, generality, etc. 

What should be the norms regulating the tinkering of scientific theories? To complicate the matter, different scientific disciplines or different scientists from the same discipline probably aim for various kinds of theoretical virtues, and scientists might disagree with philosophers about the sorts of theoretical virtues we should aim for. If so, EIPM philosophers need to develop sensitivity to this kind of discrepancy regarding theoretical virtues and provide some justification for their selection of virtues when they tinker.