Lewis and the Women

Corrections and Changes as of June 26th, 2013: See the end of the post for details on some corrections and changes to the analysis.

In the previous post I promised I would say something about the influence of David Lewis, and also something about citation frequency by gender. Some caveats at the outset. First, as I said before, this is exploratory work. I’m still in the process of cleaning the data and correcting mistakes, so things may change (although hopefully just around the margins). Second, it’s natural for people interested in this material to ask a bunch of questions about the underlying causes of any patterns that show up in the data, or to ask for various comparisons that sound straightforward (e.g., “How do relative rates of citation for men compare to those for women?”) but are actually quite complicated to answer properly, or that imply a lot more data collection and analysis than I can do here.

As before, the idea is to get a sense of what is being talked about (and talked about together) by the people who publish articles in prestigious philosophy journals that are nominally “general interest” rather than specialist outlets for the discipline. And as I emphasized last time, please bear in mind what the underlying dataset is, and what it can show. We are looking at the citations contained in all of the articles published in four major philosophy journals between 1993 and 2013. The journals are Nous, the Journal of Philosophy, the Philosophical Review, and Mind. The underlying data come from the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge article database. The citation counts I’m presenting are for specific items (books or articles) cited in the 2,200 or so articles published in these four journals since 1993—about 34,000 citations in total.

We are not examining the total number of citations to a particular article, as we are restricting ourselves just to cites within our four journals. Counts are for items (specific books or articles) rather than authors.

David Lewis

It is fair to say that over the past twenty years discussion in our four journals has been dominated by two philosophers: Saul Kripke and David Lewis. As can be seen in the network diagram, Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1980) and Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) are the connected, twin centers of the co-citation network. Naming and Necessity has 180 citations. (I undercounted this the first time I did the analysis because the book is cited three different ways in the database.) Plurality has 131 citations. Third place is W.V.O. Quine’s Word and Object (1960) with 97. Here is a table of the twenty most cited works, preserving ties so we have slightly more than twenty items.

The usual way that a scholar comes to influence their field is quite simply by writing a book or article that everyone wants to talk about. It must be discussed directly, or one must explain why talking about it in more detail can be avoided. Either way, you have to cite it. Hardly anyone writes something like this in their career, of course. Those few who do usually do not write more than one thing that has this effect on a field. Naming and Necessity is the most influential single item of this type in the data. On the Plurality of Worlds is the only work that comes close to it (and is the only other item with more than 100 cites). So Kripke’s influence is of the usual kind, mostly through a single work. Lewis is not like this. Writing a book with the impact of On the Plurality of Worlds is more than enough to make one absolutely central to one’s field. But even so, focusing on Plurality alone would radically underestimate Lewis’s influence on the philosophical conversation in our journals over the past twenty years. Look at the Top 20 table above. Naming and Necessity, Word and Object, Reasons and Persons, A Theory of Justice, The Conscious Mind, and The Varieties of Reference are all very important books. These works have had a very large—in some cases, a defining—effect on their subfields, and often beyond. Tim Williamson and Donald Davidson are unusual in that each of them has two items in the top 20: Vagueness and Knowledge and its Limits for Williamson; Essays on Actions and Events and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation for Davidson. Lewis has six items in the top twenty. He has thirteen items in the top one hundred. In the complete dataset of 526 items—the basis of the co-citation graph—thirty three are by Lewis. And he shows up all over the graph, too, not just in his main area of metaphysics.

Here is the full list of his appearances in our most-cited list:

No one else comes anywhere near this level of influence. By comparison, here is the same table for Saul Kripke—still, obviously, amongst the field’s most influential philosophers and author of the most cited work on our list. But the scope is quite different.

For someone who didn’t intend to be a systematic philosopher, Lewis certainly ended up having a systematic effect.

Women in the Data

It’s clear from the graph that the people being cited in our four journals are, overwhelmingly, white men. Getting more precise information on race or gender is time consuming, especially if we want to say anything about the relative prevalence of citations as compared to the makeup of the field. But for the top 500 or so highly-cited items we can at least say something about the number authored by women. I have gone through the list myself, and also had some help from several philosophers identifying people whom I didn’t know. There may still be some errors, and I welcome any further additions or corrections. The “P. Churchland (1989)” on the graph is Paul Churchland’s A Neurocomputational Perspective, not Patricia Churchland.

Here is a complete list of items in the data that were written by women.

Nineteen items in the data are written by women, or 3.6 percent of the total. By comparison, 6.3 percent of the items in data are written by David Lewis. (In case you’re wondering, these percentages didn’t change from the original analysis, because even though we now have one extra item by a woman and 26 extra items total, two of these new items are by, that’s right, David Lewis.)

There are fifteen women authors in total. Three of the items are in the top 100, with Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (1984) ranked highest at 47th, followed by Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity (1996, ranked 75th) and Dorothy Edgington’s “On Conditionals” (1995, ranked 82nd). There are no women in the 101-200 range, which seems notable. Christine Korsgaard has three items in the most-cited list, more than any other woman. Millikan and Foot have two each. The corrected analysis resulted in two other items by women being added to the list, one of which is a paper by Judith Jarvis Thomson. It is not her work on abortion or trolley problems, however, but rather “Parthood and Identity Across Time”. Although I have not tested this formally, I wonder whether citations to items by women might appear more often in Phil Review—compare that column to the Top 20 list above, for instance. This might happen by chance or (I am speculating here) if Phil Review is more likely than the other journals to publish articles with a higher average number of citations.

The fifteen women—in order of appearance—are Ruth Millikan, Christine Korsgaard, Dorothy Edgington, Philippa Foot, Barbara Herman, Penelope Maddy, Lynne Rudder Baker, Nancy Cartwright, Gila Sher, G.E.M. Anscombe, Susan Hurley, Sally Haslanger, L.A. Paul, Linda Zagzebski, and Judith Jarvis Thomson.

Changes and Corrections

June 26th, 2013. Further errors found and corrected in the dataset. All of these involve merging variant citations to the same work. Notable changes in the graph are the increased prominence of Davidson (1980), van Inwagen (1990), Putnam (1975), and (to a lesser degree), Wittgenstein (1953). I thank Brad Wray for drawing my attention to some of these errors.

June 20th, 2013. I have corrected several errors in the dataset, and made some changes to make the citation counts more accurate. First, a phantom item credited to “Anonymous” and notionally appearing on a single page of Philosophical Perspectives had a relatively high citation count (it was the 119th-ranked item). It has now been deleted. Second, the raw data from the Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge citation database contains twelve cases citing “Christine Korsgaard (1998) Naming and Necessity”. These are in fact cites to Kripke (1980). Third, I have taken the three different ways Naming and Necessity is cited in the database and amalgamated them into a single cite to Kripke (1980). Finally, based on some further analysis I changed the cutoff point from the top 500 to all items with at least ten citations. I did this so as not to arbitrarily exclude some items with the same number of citations as other, included items. Now we have 526 items instead of 500, all of which have been cited at least 10 times. These changes are reflected in the discussion above. I thank Juan Comesana, Gary Ostertag, Laura Schroeter, and Dave Chalmers for help identifying issues in the raw data. I welcome further corrections.

These corrections and changes mean the tables change slightly and the network is rewired a little. Naming and Necessity is now the most-cited item. Item ranks have shifted slightly due to existing items being able to move up into the vacant slots opened up by deleting mistaken items or merging cites, and some new papers enter at the bottom. Two of these items are authored by women. If you quoted from this post prior to these changes, please check to see whether the numbers you cited have changed slightly.

500 Most-Cited Items in four general-interest philosophy journals, 1993–2013

Here is the full ranked table of the 500 most-cited items—actually 520, for reasons discussed above. Again, note that I have already, and may continue, to update this table in future (and the results above), if I uncover any errors or omissions in the course of further data cleaning and analysis.