Accumulation of knowledge in para-scientific areas: the case of analytic philosophy

摘要

Without an agreed-upon definition of analytic philosophy, philosophers and historians suggest viewing it as a para-science. Due to the accumulation and growth of knowledge in analytic philosophy, the author considers it an intellectual feature of this study. This paper focuses on standards of citation behavior in analytic philosophy. The author uses Kuhn's theory of normal science as the conceptual framework for qualitative citation context analysis. In addition, Petrovich collects journal papers from five top journals, based on a survey conducted by the Leiter Reports blog [1]: The Philosophical Review, Nous, The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. All papers were published after the Second World War, between 1950 and 2009. Furthermore, the author selects the ten most-cited papers from each ten-year period (out of six periods), with a total number of 1293 references. Papers were selected for being widely read, widely cited, and of high quality, taking into account the impossibility of reading too many papers in this study due to the close reading approach chosen.