The Disconnection That Wasn’t: Philosophy in Modern Bioethics from a Quantitative Perspective

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This article refers to:

The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today

Notes

1 See (Bystranowski, Dranseika, and Żuradzki 2022b) for an explanation of how these journals were selected. The partition of the set of journals into bioethics and philosophy of medicine is grounded in topic-correlation-based clustering, for details see (Bystranowski, Dranseika, and Żuradzki 2022a).

2 With some manual corrections (we moved Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and Social Philosophy & Policy from the category Miscellaneous Social Science to Philosophy, and Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and Christian Bioethics from Philosophy to Health Policy & Services). One should also remember that NSF classifies most philosophy of science journals not in Philosophy, but in the category Science Studies.

3 Philosophy is only the fifth most frequently cited NSF category in the four bioethics journals, coming after General & Internal Medicine; Health Policy & Services; Social Sciences, Biomedical; and General Biomedical Research. Philosophy journals most frequently cited in the four bioethics journals are: Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Social Philosophy & Policy.

4 With the linear model providing a null effect of time on the proportion: B = 0.0001, t(46) = 0.93, p = .36.

5 To conduct such an analysis, we had to match our topic modeling data set with Web of Science records. We managed to match 14,213 records, which represents 73% of the corpus analyzed in Bystranowski, Dranseika, and Żuradzki (2022b).

6 What we actually find is evidence of a moderately positive linear trend for each of the five topics: 0.0009 < Bs < 0.0019, .001 < ps < .003.

7 Cohen Priva and Austerweil describe framing topics as topics that “frame content, rather than present the content itself” (2015, 4). Definitions of concepts is characterized by the following keywords: “concept”, “definition,” “kind,” “define,” “notion,” “nature,” “criterion,” “account,” “distinction,” “refer.” It seems to be expressive of conceptual analysis and definitional work in philosophy. Moral philosophy discourse is characterized by “objection,” “morally,” “relevant,” “kind,” “justify,” “account,” “thing,” “position,” “conclusion.” Given that keywords like “argumentative strategy,” “assume,” “reject,” “counterargument,” “assumption,” “premise,” “justify,” “justified,” “impermissible,” “permissible,” “wrong” are notably associated with this framing topic, we think it is justified to interpet it as expressive of a sort of explict argumentation from premises to conclusions typical of much of philosophical discourse. While both of these modes of reasoning are familiar from philosophy, perhaps they are not limited to it exclusively.

8 With the linear model providing a significant effect of time on the topic’s prominence: B = 0.0055, t(7) = 12.8, p = .006.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 805498).