2.88 Models

Category: Philosophy of Science

Keywords: models, model, woodward, parameters, cartwright, variables, variable, parameter, intervention, structural, invariance, curve, equation, correlation, equations

Number of Articles: 176
Percentage of Total: 0.5%
Rank: 82nd

Weighted Number of Articles: 217.3
Percentage of Total: 0.7%
Rank: 78th

Mean Publication Year: 1997.6
Weighted Mean Publication Year: 1991.6
Median Publication Year: 2004
Modal Publication Year: 2006

Topic with Most Overlap: Causation (0.0607)
Topic this Overlaps Most With: Thermodynamics (0.0328)
Topic with Least Overlap: Emotions (8e-05)
Topic this Overlaps Least With: Life and Value (3e-04)

A scatterplot showing which proportion of articles each year are in the modelstopic. The x-axis shows the year, the y-axis measures the proportion of articles each year in this topic. There is one dot per year. The highest value is in 2007 when 2.4% of articles were in this topic. The lowest value is in 1899 when 0.0% of articles were in this topic. The full table that provides the data for this graph is available in Table A.88 in Appendix A.

Figure 2.202: Models.

A set of twelve scatterplots showing the proportion of articles in each journal in each year that are in the Modelstopic. There is one scatterplot for each of the twelve journals that are the focus of this book. In each scatterplot, the x-axis is the year, and the y-axis is the proportion of articles in that year in that journal in this topic. Here are the average values for each of the twelve scatterplots - these tell you on average how much of the journal is dedicated to this topic. Mind - 0.2%. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society - 0.2%. Ethics - 0.2%. Philosophical Review - 0.2%. Analysis - 0.3%. Philosophy and Public Affairs - 0.2%. Journal of Philosophy - 0.5%. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research - 0.2%. Philosophy of Science - 2.2%. Noûs - 0.5%. The Philosophical Quarterly - 0.2%. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science - 2.3%. The topic reaches its zenith in year 2007 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 2.0% of the articles. And it hits a minimum in year 1899 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 0.0% of the articles.

Figure 2.203: Models articles in each journal.

Table 2.243: Characteristic articles of the models topic.
Table 2.244: Highly cited articles in the models topic.

Comments

The general theme here is models in philosophy of science. And I’m not completely sure whether this is a good topic my model to have landed on, or whether it has gotten confused by the polysemous nature of “model”.

Some of the articles here are on causal modeling, and that’s certainly an important topic in philosophy of science. And one of the interesting stories of the period this topic is centered on is the drift of causation from being a metaphysics topic to a philosophy of science topic.

And some of the articles here are about the use of models in special sciences (e.g., economics, climate science), and what the epistemology of learning from models looks like.

And some of the articles are about objectivist versus Bayesian approaches to statistics.

And all of these have things in common. Indeed, any two of them could naturally be put into a topic together. Still, I can’t quite shake the feeling that it is the word ‘model’, rather than any one meaning for that word, that is holding these papers together.

This wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen—text-mining like this is always susceptible to getting confusing results when there are polysemous terms around. And it’s kind of striking how little that has affected our story to date.