3. Sentiment Analysis

For those who are concerned about selection bias in the results of the 2009 and 2020 PhilPapers Surveys, there is another way to gauge the disagreement about progress in academic philosophy among academic philosophers, namely, to study a digital corpus of philosophical texts. This is where computational, digital, and corpus-based methods of text mining and analysis can be useful. In particular, if we can gather a sample of philosophical texts about philosophical progress written by academic philosophers, and then classify them into pessimistic/negative and optimistic/positive, we can get a pretty good sense of the disagreement about philosophical progress among academic philosophers. So this is precisely what I set out to do. … [please read below the rest of the article].

Image credit: aaron.inmontreal via Flickr / Creative Commons

More specifically, I ran a sentiment analysis, also known as “opinion mining” (Liu 2017), on a sample of philosophical texts about philosophical progress to find out whether academic philosophers generally express optimistic/positive or pessimistic/negative sentiments toward—or have optimistic/positive or pessimistic/negative opinions about—philosophical progress in their published works. To do this, I searched the Scopus database^[1] for philosophical publications with the terms ‘philosoph*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords.^[2] Then, I cleaned up the data by removing incomplete search results and results from publications that are not about progress in academic philosophy. For example, here is an abstract of a publication that was removed from the dataset:

Perhaps the biggest disconnect between philosophers and non-philosophers on the question of gun rights is over the relevance of arms to our dignitary interests. This essay attempts to address this gap by arguing that we have a strong prima facie moral right to resist with dignity and that violence is sometimes our most or only dignified method of resistance. Thus, we have a strong prima facie right to guns when they are necessary often enough for effective dignified resistance. This approach is distinctively non-libertarian: it doesn’t justify gun rights on the basis of (mere) liberty or security. Nonetheless it is compatible with libertarian defenses of gun rights based on a liberty right to guns, and, if sound, in fact lowers the bar for gun rights in some ways, as it justifies access to guns even when nonviolent means would better achieve the liberty or security aims of potential victims. And although this defense of gun rights is most readily categorized as “conservative” or rightist, it relies upon principles and intuitions about dignity popular among progressives in other domains, such as in disability, women’s, or LGBT rights debates (Demetriu 2022; emphasis added).

While there is an occurrence of the term ‘progressive’ in this abstract, the term is not used to say that academic philosophy is progressive or to talk about progress in academic philosophy at all. Instead, the term is used in its political sense to talk about people with progressive political views.^[3] After cleaning up the data, I got a list of 51 philosophical publications with the terms ‘philosoph*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords.^[4]

I used the Azure Machine Learning add-in in Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Office 365) to run a sentiment analysis on the abstracts of these 51 philosophical publications. Azure Machine Learning is a free analytics tool that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to run analyses, such as sentiment analysis, on unstructured text. A sentiment analysis “is a process of automatically extracting opinions or emotions from text, especially in user-generated textual content. Sentiment analysis is considered a classification task which classifies text into positive, negative, or neutral classes” (Kumar and Harish 2020, 1122).

The Azure Machine Learning text sentiment analysis uses the Multi-Perspective Question Answering (MPQA) Subjectivity Lexicon (http://mpqa.cs.pitt.edu/lexicons/subj_lexicon/), which is a commonly used subjectivity lexicon in NLP. The MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon includes 5,097 negative words and 2,533 positive words with strong and weak polarity annotations. As Wilson et al. (2005, 348) explain:

The positive tag is for positive emotions (I’m happy), evaluations (Great idea!), and stances (She supports the bill). The negative tag is for negative emotions (I’m sad), evaluations (Bad idea!), and stances (She’s against the bill). […] The neutral tag is used for all other subjective expressions: those that express a different type of subjectivity such as speculation, and those that do not have positive or negative polarity (emphasis in original).^[5]

Accordingly, the output of a sentiment analysis performed by the Azure Machine Learning algorithm includes the sentiment tags of ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and/or ‘neutral’, as well as their associated scores between zero and one. A score close to zero gets a ‘negative’ tag, a score close to one gets a ‘positive’ tag, and a score approximately midpoint between zero and one gets a ‘neutral’ tag.

Accordingly, if we run a sentiment analysis on the text from the abstracts of the aforementioned 51 philosophical publications with the terms ‘philosoph*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords, we can find out whether the authors express mostly optimistic/positive or pessimistic/negative sentiments toward philosophical progress. If this sample of 51 philosophical publications with the terms ‘philosoph*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords is a random sample (that is, presumably, any philosophical publication with the terms ‘philosoph*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords has had a roughly equal chance of making it into the search results on the Scopus database), then we can be quite confident that the results of the sentiment analysis will be fairly representative of the sentiments toward philosophical progress expressed in philosophical publications rather generally.

The results of this sentiment analysis are as follows. Of the 51 philosophical publications from the Scopus database, the Azure Machine Learning algorithm tagged 23 as ‘negative’ (45%), 19 as ‘positive’ (37%), and 9 as ‘neutral’ (18%). The mean score of the negative publications is 0.12 (M = 0.12, SD = 0.14), the mean score of the positive publications is 0.81 (M = 0.81, SD = 0.11), and the mean score of the neutral publications is 0.52 (M = 0.52, SD = 0.04). See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Classification of 51 publications on philosophical progress written by academic philosophers into negative, positive, and neutral sentiment classes based on their abstracts.

Although the Azure Machine Learning text sentiment analysis uses the Multi-Perspective Question Answering (MPQA) Subjectivity Lexicon (http://mpqa.cs.pitt.edu/lexicons/subj_lexicon/), which is a commonly used subjectivity lexicon in NLP, one might worry about the accuracy of the Azure Machine Learning algorithm in classifying texts into ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘neutral’. For this reason, I have inspected three results selected at random from the philosophy dataset–one tagged ‘positive’, one tagged ‘negative’, and one tagged ‘neutral–in an attempt to verify the accuracy of the classification task. Here are the three results selected at random:

1. Positive: “This article argues, first, that there is plenty of agreement among philosophers on philosophically substantive claims, which fall into three categories: reasons for or against certain views, elementary truths regarding fundamental notions, and highly conditionalized claims. This agreement suggests that there is important philosophical progress. It then argues that although it’s easy to list several potential kinds of philosophical progress, it is much harder to determine whether the potential is actual. Then the article attempts to articulate the truth that the deniers of philosophical progress are latching on to. Finally, it comments on the significance of the agreement and (potential) progress” (Frances 2017).

2. Negative: “I argue that the best explanation of the multiplicity of available frameworks for treating any given philosophical topic is that philosophy currently (though not insuperably) lacks fixed standards; I then go on to identify three barriers to philosophical progress associated with our present epistemic situation. First is that the lack of fixed standards encourages what I call ‘intra-disciplinary siloing’, and associated dialectical and argumentative failings; second is that the lack of fixed standards makes room for sociological factors (including elite influence and disciplinary inertia) to be determinative of which philosophical frameworks are embraced; third is that the lack of fixed standards encourages (implicit and/or explicit) bias. I close by offering some suggestions about how to move beyond these barriers, even in the absence of fixed standards” (Wilson 2017).

3. Neutral: “Any adequate attempt to discuss progressivity in philosophy should provide some explanation of why philosophy persistently honours ‘the old and the false’ and deals with original texts in a way in which science does not. An attempt is made to answer this question by appealing to: (1) the aporetic character of philosophy; (2) the semantical solipsism of philosophy; (3) the subjectivity of philosophy, and; (4) poetical continuities in philosophy” (Woods 1988).

A z-test for proportions indicates that the difference between the proportion of negative publications (0.45) and positive publications (0.37) on philosophical progress is not statistically significant (z = 0.81, p = 0.42, two-sided). These results suggest that publications on philosophical progress written by academic philosophers tend to contain both optimistic/positive and pessimistic/negative sentiments about philosophical progress with no significant differences between the optimistic/positive sentiments and the pessimistic/negative sentiments. In other words, the results of a sentiment analysis appear to bear out the fact that academic philosophers disagree about whether there is progress in academic philosophy: some academic philosophers are optimistic and have positive opinions about philosophical progress, whereas other academic philosophers are pessimistic and have negative opinions about philosophical progress.

By contrast, a sentiment analysis of scientific texts on scientific progress suggests that scientists tend to be optimistic and have positive attitudes toward progress in science. That is, unlike academic philosophers, for whom there is no question that science makes significant progress, but there is an open question as to whether academic philosophy makes progress (and if so, how much), scientists tend to be more optimistic/positive than pessimistic/negative about progress in science.

A similar sentiment analysis, but with text from scientific publications on scientific progress suggests that scientists tend to be more optimistic/positive than pessimistic/negative about scientific progress. More specifically, I ran a sentiment analysis on a sample of scientific texts about scientific progress to find out whether scientists generally express optimistic/positive or pessimistic/negative sentiments toward—or have optimistic/positive or pessimistic/negative opinions about—scientific progress.

To do this, I searched the Scopus database for publications with the terms ‘scien*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords.^[6] After removing incomplete search results and cleaning up the data from publications that are not about progress in science, I got a list of 174 scientific publications with the terms ‘scien*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords.^[7] Again, if this sample of 174 scientific publications with the terms ‘scien*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords is a random sample (that is, presumably, any scientific publication with the terms ‘scien*’ and ‘progress*’ in the title, abstract, and/or keywords has had a roughly equal chance of making it into the search results on the Scopus database), then we can be quite confident that the results of the sentiment analysis will be fairly representative of the sentiments of scientists toward scientific progress rather generally.

The results of this sentiment analysis are as follows. Of the 174 scientific publications from the Scopus database, the Azure Machine Learning algorithm tagged 95 as ‘positive’ (55%), 67 as ‘negative’ (38%), and 12 as ‘neutral’ (7%). The mean score of the positive publications is 0.82 (M = 0.82, SD = 0.12), the mean score of the negative publications is 0.18 (M = 0.18, SD = 0.15), and the mean score of the neutral publications is 0.53 (M = 0.53, SD = 0.03). See Figure 2.

Figure 2. Classification of 174 publications on scientific progress written by scientists into negative, positive, and neutral sentiment classes based on their abstracts.

Although the Azure Machine Learning text sentiment analysis uses the Multi-Perspective Question Answering (MPQA) Subjectivity Lexicon (http://mpqa.cs.pitt.edu/lexicons/subj_lexicon/), which is a commonly used subjectivity lexicon in NLP, one might worry about the accuracy of the Azure Machine Learning algorithm in classifying texts into ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘neutral’. For this reason, I have inspected three results selected at random from the science dataset–one tagged ‘positive’, one tagged ‘negative’, and one tagged ‘neutral’–in an attempt to verify the accuracy of the classification task. Here are the three results selected at random:

1. Positive: “Today climate change has caused extensive concern of the whole society. Paleoclimate change studies in geological time (including Quaternary and “Deep Time”), in which continental scientific drilling plays a significant role, provide important references to the current climate change. This paper reviews scientific progresses in the study of paleoclimate change in continental scientific drilling projects. In advantage of the continuous sedimentary records acquired by the continental scientific drilling projects, high-resolution chronostratigraphic framework is established and multiple paleoclimatic proxies are applied. With the aim to decipher the process and mechanism of climate change, progresses have been achieved on paleoclimatic reconstructions on different timescales, detailed studies on rapid climate changes, and precise correlation between marine and terrestrial paleoclimatic records. It is predictable that continental scientific drilling will be more influential in the paleoclimate studies in future, especially in deep-time greenhouse climate studies” (Gao et al. 2019).

2. Negative: “We address the question posed in the title of this paper by investigating recent developments in the literature that estimates the NAIRU. A necessary condition for the existence of a NAIRU is dynamic homogeneity: the Phillips curve should be homogeneous of degree one in lagged and/or expected inflation. But contemporary approaches to estimating the NAIRU typically assume rather than test for dynamic homogeneity, thus assuming (rather than testing for) the existence of a NAIRU. We argue that these developments remove the NAIRU from the domain of testable hypotheses and transform the concept into an article of faith. This does not constitute scientific progress” (Lang 2020).

3. Neutral: “Stroke induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion in adult rodents induces the formation of new neurons in the damaged striatum, a region that normally does not show neurogenesis. Here we describe recent findings on the regulation of neurogenesis after stroke, in particular regarding the duration of the neurogenic response and the influence of age, as well as the molecular mechanisms influencing migration and survival of the new neurons. We also discuss some crucial issues that need to be addressed in the further exploration of this potential self-repair mechanism after damage to the adult brain” (Kokaia 2006).

A z-test for proportions indicates that the difference between the proportion of positive publications (0.55) and negative publications (0.38) on scientific progress written by scientists is statistically significant (z = 3.01, p = 0.002, two-sided). These results suggest that publications on scientific progress written by scientists contain significantly more optimistic/positive than pessimistic/negative sentiments about scientific progress. In other words, the results suggest that, like academic philosophers, scientists tend to express optimistic/positive sentiments about scientific progress in their academic publications.

To sum up, then, whether there is progress in science is not in question, as far as both scientists and philosophers of science are concerned. Philosophers of science tend to agree that science makes significant progress, although they disagree about how to construe scientific progress. On the other hand, whether there is progress in academic philosophy (and if so, how much) is an open question, as far as academic philosophers are concerned. Some academic philosophers are optimistic and have positive attitudes toward philosophical progress, whereas other academic philosophers are pessimistic and have negative attitudes toward philosophical progress. By contrast, most scientists are optimistic and have positive attitudes toward scientific progress.

Like the results of the PhilPapers Surveys (see Section 2 above), the results of sentiment analyses suggest that academic philosophers would probably agree that science makes much more progress than academic philosophy does, given that academic philosophers generally agree that there is significant progress in science, but they do not agree that the same can be said about academic philosophy. To use Chalmers’ (2014, 3) terminology again, the results of sentiment analyses suggest that most academic philosophers would give a negative answer to “the Comparison Question” (namely, “is there as much progress in philosophy as in science?”), just as Chalmers (2014, 4) does.^[8] But if there is much more progress in science than in academic philosophy, as most academic philosophers seem to think, then it follows that science is better than academic philosophy in terms of making progress.

4. Scientism and Progress

As we have seen, the results of the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, specifically, the responses to the question about philosophical progress, suggest that most academic philosophers would give a negative answer to “the Comparison Question” (namely, “is there as much progress in philosophy as in science?”), just as Chalmers (2014, 4) does, since most academic philosophers disagree about whether academic philosophy makes progress, and to what extent, but they agree that science makes significant progress.

Likewise, the results of a sentiment analysis also suggest that most academic philosophers would give a negative answer to “the Comparison Question” (namely, “is there as much progress in philosophy as in science?”), just as Chalmers (2014, 4) does, since some academic philosophers are optimistic and have positive opinions about philosophical progress, whereas other academic philosophers are pessimistic and have negative opinions about philosophical progress, and there are no significant differences between the optimistic/positive sentiments and the pessimistic/negative sentiments. When it comes to scientific progress, however, academic philosophers generally agree that there is significant progress in science, even though they define scientific progress in different terms.

Now, given that, other things being equal, it is generally better for an academic discipline to make progress than to make little or no progress, it follows that science is better than academic philosophy in terms of making progress, by academic philosophers’ own lights. After all, an academic discipline that does not make progress is not attaining its epistemic goals, whether the goal is to approximate truth, to accumulate knowledge, to increase understanding, or to solve problems. As Jaspers (1951/2003, 7) puts it:

For the scientific-minded, the worst aspect of philosophy is that it produces no universally valid results; it provides nothing that we can know and thus possess. Whereas the sciences in their fields have gained compellingly certain and universally recognized insights, philosophy, despite thousands of years of endeavour, has done nothing of the sort. This is undeniable: in philosophy there is no generally accepted, definite knowledge. […] Nor is philosophical thought like the sciences, characterized by progressive development (emphasis added).

If there is much more progress in science than in academic philosophy, as most academic philosophers seem to think, then it follows that science is better than academic philosophy in terms of making progress because, other things being equal, it is generally better for an academic discipline to make progress than to make little or no progress.

Clearly, the fact that most academic philosophers seem to agree that science makes more progress than academic philosophy, as the results of the 2020 PhilPapers Survey (Bourget and Chalmers 2021) and the results of sentiment analyses suggest, given the consensus among academic philosophers about the former and the lack of consensus about the latter, does not necessarily mean that science actually makes more progress than academic philosophy. After all, what most academic philosophers generally believe could be wrong. So, it is important to emphasize again that the aforementioned the results of the 2020 PhilPapers Survey (Bourget and Chalmers 2021) and the results of sentiment analyses are not meant to support the claim that, as a matter of fact, science makes more progress than academic philosophy. Instead, they are meant to show that most academic philosophers would accept the premise that science makes more progress than academic philosophy.

Now, if they also accept the premise that academic disciplines that make progress are superior to academic disciplines that make little progress or no progress at all, then they would have to accept the conclusion that follows from those two premises, namely, that science is better than academic philosophy in terms of making progress. This is an argument for Weak Scientism because it identifies another dimension along which scientific disciplines can be said to be superior to a non-scientific discipline like academic philosophy. Mizrahi’s (2017a) argument identifies several dimensions along which scientific knowledge can be said to be better than non-scientific knowledge.

First, there are the quantitative dimensions of research output (as measured by number of publications) and research impact (as measured by number of citations); in particular, scientific disciplines produce more knowledge and the knowledge they produce has more impact than the knowledge produced by non-scientific disciplines.

Second, there are the quantitative dimensions of explanation, prediction, and intervention; in particular, scientific knowledge is explanatorily, predictively, and instrumentally more successful than non-scientific knowledge. To these we can now add progress. That is, if there is much more progress in science than in academic philosophy, as most academic philosophers would seem to agree, then science can be said to be better than academic philosophy in terms of making progress as well.

It is worth noting that the point of arguing that science is better than academic philosophy along the aforementioned dimensions, including the dimension of progress, is not to belittle academic philosophy in any way. Even if science is more successful and more progressive than academic philosophy, it doesn’t have to be. In other words, that science is more successful and progressive than academic philosophy is not a necessary truth. Indeed, many prominent philosophers throughout the history of philosophy were impressed with science and tried to emulate its success (Voegelin 1948). For example, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) introduced concepts from the new science of the seventeenth century, such as force and endeavour, into social and political philosophy. Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) incorporated the geometrical method into metaphysics and moral philosophy. David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-1740) was an “attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.”

These historical precedents suggest that there is no reason to think that academic philosophy could not be as successful and progressive as scientific disciplines are. Indeed, much like the aforementioned historical figures, some contemporary philosophers have argued that the adoption and application of scientific methods to philosophical inquiry has been quite successful. For example, according to Buckwalter and Turri (2018, 282), “Experimental, observational, and statistical techniques have significantly contributed to research in epistemology, action theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.” Moreover, Van De Poel (2020, 231-244) argues that, if they want to make academic philosophy “societally relevant,” academic philosophers need to incorporate the synthetic methods of designers as well as techniques of experimentation into philosophical inquiry. Accordingly, rather than pit science against philosophy, Weak Scientism emphasizes the continuity between philosophy and science.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I developed an argument for Weak Scientism, which is the view that scientific knowledge is the best (but not the only) knowledge we have (Mizrahi 2017a). This argument for Weak Scientism proceeds from the premise that academic disciplines that make progress are superior to academic disciplines that do not make progress. In other words, other things being equal, it is generally better for an academic discipline to make progress than to make little or no progress, given that an academic discipline that is making little or no progress is an academic discipline that is failing to achieve its epistemic goals. Now, if academic philosophers generally agree that science makes progress, and significantly so, but they do not agree as to whether academic philosophy makes progress (and if so, how much), then they would have to grant that science is superior to academic philosophy in terms of making progress. Empirical support for the premises of this argument comes from the results of the 2020 PhilPapers Survey (Bourget and Chalmers 2021) and the results of sentiment analyses.

Like the results of the PhilPapers Surveys (see Section 2 above), the results of these sentiment analyses suggest that academic philosophers would probably agree that science makes much more progress than academic philosophy does, given that academic philosophers generally agree that there is significant progress in science, but they do not agree that the same can be said about academic philosophy (see Section 3 above). If there is much more progress in science than in academic philosophy, as most academic philosophers seem to think, then it follows that science is better than academic philosophy in terms of making progress because, other things being equal, it is generally better for an academic discipline to make progress than to make little or no progress. This is not to say that academic philosophy cannot be as progressive as science is thought to be. Just as great philosophers of old, like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hume, borrowed from the best sciences of their time, contemporary philosophers can do the same.

❧ Please refer to Part I of “Scientism and Sentiments about Progress in Science and Academic Philosophy.”

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^[1] The Scopus database was selected because it aims to deliver “the broadest coverage of any interdisciplinary abstract and citation database” and it covers “240 disciplines” (https://www-elsevier-com.portal.lib.fit.edu/solutions/scopus/how-scopus-works/content). Even though it aims for a broad interdisciplinary coverage, one might still worry that Scopus has a better coverage of science than philosophy publications. In that respect, other databases, such as Google Scholar, could have been used to mine textual data from philosophy publications about progress in academic philosophy. Unlike Scopus, however, Google Scholar does not allow researchers to easily download search results and it does not provide metadata, including abstracts, with search results. For these reasons, Scopus is a more user-friendly database than Google Scholar for a digital, corpus-based study such as the one I have conducted for this paper.

^[2] The truncation operator * was used in order to include terms, such as ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosophical’, as well as ‘progressive’ and ‘progressively’, in the search results.

^[3] This methodology may be too restrictive, since there could be philosophical publications that contain discussions of progress in academic philosophy even if their titles, abstracts, and/or keywords do not contain occurrences of the terms ‘philosoph*’ and ‘progress*’. Moreover, philosophers who write about philosophical progress (or lack thereof) may be more inclined to see it as a problem worthy of treatment in writing. As we will see, the results of the sentiment analysis are consistent with the results of the 2009 and 2020 PhilPapers Surveys, which may go some way toward addressing this worry.

^[4] The complete list of publications and raw data are available here: https://osf.io/85f6j/?view_only=218197447df94026894653f150504b63.

^[5] See also Wiebe et al. (2005) for more details on sentiment analysis in NLP and the MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon.

^[6] The truncation operator * was used in order to include terms, such as ‘science’ and ‘scientific’, as well as ‘progressive’ and ‘progressively’, in the search results.

^[7] The complete list of publications and raw data are available here: https://osf.io/85f6j/?view_only=218197447df94026894653f150504b63.

^[8] See also Hansson (2016, 215): “No one can doubt that there is progress in the natural sciences, but it is much more debated whether there is progress in philosophy.”

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Tags: acquiring knowledge, acquiring knowledge and understanding, deference to science, future successes of science, Moti Mizrahi, progress in philosophy, scientism, scientism debate, SERRC 6/27/2023