3 Summary Graphs

In the previous chapter I discussed the ninety topics one at a time. The aim of this chapter is to find some way to graph them all at once. The short version of the chapter is that it’s an impossible task, and there is too much data to really show all of the trends on one graph. The longer version is that there are a few graphs that are flawed in different ways, and between them they might help give some sense to what the trends were in the philosophy journals over this time.

In the first section I’ll present the (pair of) graphs that do the best job of showing what the trends were. In the second section I’ll go over the three binary choices that we have in thinking about how to present the data, leading to eight possible graphs. One of these is the one presented in the first section, but there are cases to be made for each of the other seven as well. So in the remaining sections, I’ll go over each of those seven possible graphs.