Natural Language Processing and Network Visualization for Philosophers

Progress in philosophy is difficult to achieve because our methods are evidentially and rhetorically weak (Chalmers 2015). In the last two decades, experimental philosophers have begun to employ the methods of the social sciences to address philosophical questions (e.g. Weinberg et al. 2001; Nichols and Knobe 2007; Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2012). However, the adequacy of these methods has been called into question by repeated failures of replication (Open Science Collaboration 2015). In the next decade, experimental philosophers need to incorporate more robust methods to achieve a multi-modal perspective. In this chapter, we explain and showcase exemplars of a promising methodology for experimental and empirical philosophy: network analysis and visualization.

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