Knowledge Accumulation in Analytic Philosophy

By looking at the textual context that surrounds in-text citations, it is possible to reconstruct the epistemological functions that they play in the citing text. In this way, constructive or destructive epistemological operations can be traced with citation analysis. In this chapter, the technique of epistemological citation context analysis is used to investigate how knowledge accumulates in analytic philosophy and, in particular, to assess whether analytic philosophy has entered into a Kuhnian normal-scientific phase. The classification of more than 1,700 citations from 70 analytic philosophy articles published between 1950 and 2019 shows that a soft paradigm has taken over in the field. Differently from classic Kuhnian normal sciences in which a paradigm attracts the consensus of the community, in analytic philosophy the soft paradigm guarantees the stability of the structure of the field itself. The Chapter concludes by discussing the complex interplay of epistemology and rhetoric in the use of citations.