Tracing the words of the analytic turn in the Journal of Philosophy

We carried out a quantitative analysis of the 20th-century philosophical lexicon, based on corpora drawn from a leading US philosophical review, the Journal of Philosophy. In the paper, we present and discuss some findings of ours, with special regard to analytic philosophy, a contemporary philosophical tradition that plays a leading role in the English-speaking world. More specifically, we present some results that are relevant to the process of rise to dominance of analytic philosophy in US ­ a process that we call “analytic turn”. In a nutshell, we found that the lexicon related to topics that are characteristic of (half-of-the-century) analytic philosophy, such as semantics, logic and epistemology, underwent a significant gain in importance within the Journal of Philosophy during the three post-Second War decades. We also observed a corresponding decrease in importance of the lexicon related to non-English-speaking, “continental” philosophy, and to themes of generic human and social interest. We also found that the turning point in both processes can be approximately located between the mid Fifties and the early Sixties. Although we shall discuss reasons to be cautious in drawing conclusions about the history of philosophy from lexical data concerning philosophical journals, these and other results of ours suggest a picture of the analytic turn that is a little different from some commonplace opinion among analytic philosophers.