Diachronic trends in the topic distributions of formal epistemology abstracts

Formal epistemology is a growing field of philosophical research. It is also evolving, with the subject matter of formal epistemology papers changing considerably over the past two decades. To quantify the ways in which formal epistemology is changing, I generate a stochastic block topic model of the abstracts of papers classified by PhilPapers.org as pertaining to formal epistemology. This model identifies fourteen salient topics of formal epistemology abstracts at a first level of abstraction, and four topics at a second level of abstraction. I then study diachronic trends in the degree to which formal epistemology abstracts written in a given year are likely to contain words associated with a particular topic, beginning in 2000 and continuing to 2020. My findings suggest that there has been a marked decline in the likelihood of a given formal epistemology abstract being about logical approaches to belief revision (e.g., AGMbelief-revision theory). On the other hand, over the past two decades, the salience of probabilistic techniques in formal epistemology has increased, as has the salience of work at the intersection of formal epistemology and some areas of philosophy of science.

Automated summary

Formal epistemology is a growing and evolving field of philosophical research. The study found that over the past two decades, there have been significant changes in the topics of formal epistemology, with a decline in the study of logical approaches to belief revision and an increase in the salience of probabilistic techniques and the intersection of formal epistemology with philosophy of science.