Socio-Epistemic Communities in Analytic Philosophy

Knowledge systems, including analytic philosophy, can be modeled as multi-layer networks comprising three layers: the semantic, the semiotic, and the social. In this chapter, we show how, by leveraging the information contained in the acknowledgments, we can successfully investigate the social layer of recent analytic philosophy. In the first part of the chapter, network analysis is used to reconstruct the sociological fine-grained structure of the discipline. Different types of philosophers are distinguished based on their position in the social network, and a core and a periphery are individuated. In the second part of the chapter, citations and acknowledgments are combined to investigate the interface between the semantic and the social layers. Socio-epistemic communities are identified and the overlap between the social and epistemic influence of analytic philosophers is assessed.