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  "path": "/2026/03/02/discussion-arcs-for-topics-and-philosophers-guest-post/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-02T16:18:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "When over the past 85 years have certain terms and persons been more or less frequently discussed in the philosophical literature? Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) has begun looking into this. In the following guest post, he shares some initial findings. The information may be useful in a number of ways. As he notes, “looking for distinctive terms or phrases connected to particular arguments, we can also track when an argument receives wide uptake.” (A version of this post first appeared at Professor Schwitzgebel’s blog, The Splintered Mind.) Discussion Arcs for Topics and Philosophers by Eric Schwitzgebel Let’s define a discussion arc in philosophy as a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords. Discussion arcs can reveal trends over time, as they come and go. For example, “ordinary language” was a popular topic of discussion in the 1960s: My method: I searched for the term in the abstract, title, or keywords (subject) of articles in Philosopher’s Index, in five-year chunks from 1940-1945 to 2021-2025.[1] I then divided the number of hits by a representative universe of hits for abstract or title containing “language”, “epistemology”, “mind”, “metaphysics”, “ethics”, “moral”, “political”, “aesthetics”, or “logic”.[2] By looking for distinctive terms or phrases connected to particular arguments, we can also track when an argument receives wide uptake. For example, Hilary Putnam’s famous “Twin Earth” thought experiment, though originally presented in 1975, didn’t receive much immediate uptake, receiving peak discussion in the 1990s: We can also look for topical trends. If you think artificial intelligence is recently hot, you’re right! The figure also shows a smaller peak in the late 1980s, before the “AI winter” that has recently thawed. Another thing you might see in the artificial intelligence arc, if you squint, is noise early in the data. This makes sense, since the early data have far fewer hits in the representative universe of articles containing one of the nine keywords: 457 articles in 1940-1945, compared to 33,552 in 2016-2020. We can also examine the discussion arcs of particular philosophers. Note that “discussion” in the sense I’ve defined is very different from citation. A philosopher who is cited in passing might have very little influence on the shape of an article. In contrast, if a..\n\nThe post Discussion Arcs for Topics and Philosophers (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.",
  "title": "Discussion Arcs for Topics and Philosophers (guest post)"
}