7.6 Words and Decades

I’m not going to start with the list of most common words each decade, because it just looks like what we found back in section 7.3. Some words are really common and they stay that way through the data set. What’s more interesting is to look at words that are more common in a particular decade than they are in general. And this in turn requires picking a domain of words.

I’ll start with the one thousand most common words (stop words excluded) from the data set. (I’m not going to do the graphs that I did in section 7.3, because they would just be repetitive; it’s very often just the same words.)

Table 7.22: Most distinctive words in each decade (among 1000 most common words)

1890s	1900s	1910s	1920s	1930s	1940s
pleasure	consciousness	reality	organism	propositions	art
consciousness	reality	consciousness	minds	soul	men
sensation	unity	unity	reality	quality	phenomenological
sensations	absolute	absolute	quality	plato	inquiry
unity	feeling	movement	essence	art	modern
feeling	ultimate	whole	qualities	method	ethical
conscious	conscious	conscious	immediate	ultimate	sciences
movement	activity	universe	soul	qualities	war
reality	series	soul	whole	immediate	method
feelings	experience	appearance	universe	substance	procedure

1950s	1960s	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s
ethical	statements	quine	rights	intentional	epistemic
statements	statement	rawls	utility	strategy	models
statement	logically	jones	realist	rawls	population
analytic	jones	legal	rationality	worlds	normative
art	aesthetic	predicates	death	cognitive	selection
men	analytic	wants	frege	water	intuitions
aesthetic	criteria	criteria	rawls	david	agents
descriptive	legal	descriptions	persons	modal	strategy
inquiry	wittgenstein	justice	intentional	beliefs	semantic
philosopher	saying	obligation	equality	probabilities	david

I guess nothing there is too surprising. The keywords in the first few decades are basically what we’d expect if there was a lot of idealism going on. Then there is much more attention to aesthetics in the middle decades, as well as a huge focus on statements. (I think the term statement is too ambiguous between sentence, utterance and proposition to be used nowadays, but that clearly wasn’t the view then.) And then Rawls shows up, along with some people called David. Probabilities shows up in the 1990s but not later because it is replaced, as we’ll see, with credences. The boom in the topic norms looks a little less surprising when you see normative is used so much, especially in the 2000s, that it ends up on the list of one thousand most common words.

Let’s increase the domain to the three thousand most common words in the data set.

Table 7.23: Most distinctive words in each decade (among 3000 most common words)

1890s	1900s	1910s	1920s	1930s	1940s
volition	psychical	psychical	apprehension	esthetic	esthetic
motor	bradley	intellect	essences	verification	whitehead
psychical	volition	individuality	spiritual	whitehead	dewey
pleasures	idealism	duration	alexander	datum	peirce
pleasure	consciousness	bradley	religion	symbol	democracy
consciousness	reality	apprehension	stimuli	postulates	mankind
intensity	connexion	acquaintance	existent	characters	signs
nervous	apprehension	connexion	esthetic	spinoza	organization
organic	presentation	idealism	psychical	symbols	arts
impulse	succession	recognise	individuality	philosophic	peace

1950s	1960s	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s
ryle	austin	marx	nuclear	twin	williamson
ayer	hare	popper	nozick	computational	scenario
dewey	strawson	hare	parfit	fodor	luck
esthetic	ayer	hempel	dummett	supervenience	credence
ethical	ryle	strawson	market	processing	global
usage	verb	utilitarian	preferences	consensus	populations
theology	verbs	discrimination	rights	fraassen	epistemically
whitehead	hempel	geach	dworkin	liberalism	representational
conscience	statements	criminal	kripke	bell	epistemic
statements	statement	searle	labor	salmon	testimony

The main auditorium at Monash University is the Alexander Hall. Graduations are there, but it isn’t otherwise a major part of student life. I think I went there more often as a high school student than as a university student. But still, it was nice to know that a big part of the university was named after a philosopher, Samuel Alexander. There was also a nice sketch of him on the wall of one of the seminar rooms in the philosophy department while I was there. That didn’t mean that we actually talked about Alexander’s work; I don’t remember ever being assigned one of his papers in a class or seminar. That was perhaps a bit too bad, since he’s arguably the second most important Australian philosopher for the first half of the twentieth century.

Let’s expand this list to the five thousand most common words.

Table 7.24: Most distinctive words in each decade (among 5000 most common words)

1890s	1900s	1910s	1920s	1930s	1940s
muscular	psychical	bergson	bosanquet	esthetic	esthetic
spencer	presentations	schiller	instincts	sensa	hartmann
volition	spencer	bosanquet	santayana	verification	emotive
presentations	stout	royce	sensa	schiller	morris
motor	bradley	instinct	instinct	whitehead	whitehead
antithesis	schiller	instincts	apprehension	verifiable	civilization
nerve	pragmatism	psychical	essences	datum	dewey
instinct	volition	apprehended	spiritual	physicist	peirce
instincts	sidgwick	stout	stout	verified	sociology
psychical	hegelian	pragmatism	existents	symbol	positivists

1950s	1960s	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s
emotive	malcolm	illocutionary	nuclear	churchland	hawthorne
stevenson	austin	marx	deterrence	twin	contextualism
ryle	grue	lakatos	exploitation	burge	scanlon
historian	hare	capitalist	nozick	pettit	williamson
santayana	strawson	torture	smoking	computational	chalmers
poem	ayer	lorentz	parfit	fodor	normativity
philosophies	ryle	metric	soviet	laudan	woodward
royce	verb	privacy	laudan	usa	egalitarianism
weber	verbs	crimes	rorty	supervenience	korsgaard
historians	judicial	hintikka	dummett	externalism	scenarios

When I was cleaning out the data I thought that sensa was some kind of OCR error. But it’s a really common word in 1920s and 1930s discussions of sense data. In later years, the distinctive words tend to be more and more to do with names.

That said, we also see here a word that I should have filtered out: basil. Some uses of it are legitimate, but most are because Basil Blackwell turns up in bibliographies. I wish I’d caught that one.