Brian Weatherson has done some nice data crunching of his own inspired by the Healy-data (eliciting an important comment by Jennifer Nagel), especially here. In particular, he looked at citations in a broader range of journals than the H4. Now Brian's crucial point is: "Lesson 1: It’s easy to be wrong about what people are talking about, if you try to generalise from personal experience." This is important to keep in mind for all of us that need to make decisions about the future of the field (i.e., future job candidates and those that supervise them.) Brian is a privileged observer having helped shape cutting-edge M&E as a presence at a variety of top departments. (I made a similar observation last week in light of converging evidence.) His data also show that the recent debate over philosophical intuitions (see Catarina [and Mohan and here]) is generating a lot of discussion outside of the H4. This is part of a larger phenomenon: while H4 articles are cutting edge (by stipulation), their citations are a lagging indicator of current trends (see also here and here). This may be due, in part, to their relatively slow refereeing process (thus, building in delay from submission to acceptance), or it may be due to in-crowd refereeing (so that in effect citations of high status males are privileged).
Here I focus on Brian's surprise about "336 citations for a paper about mechanisms!" This is a reference to "Thinking about mechanisms" by P Machamer, L. Darden, CF Craver in Philosophy of science (2000) [here for direct access]. (Hereafter MDC) There is no evidence that Brian thinks MDC does not merit attention. Brian's lack of awareness of the importance of this paper is indicative of a genuine split between: (a) post-Lewisian folk that take the metaphysics and epistemology of science, especially inspired by text-book physics, seriously and (b) those of us that focus more on scientific practice, past and present, in our philosophy of science, epistemology, and even metaphysics. Moreover, Brian's tendency to suggest that the high citation-rate for MDC must be due to a non-philosophical audience suggests (with N=1) that folk in (a) tend to underestimate how large the community of (b) is within philosophy.
Now, a few months ago I re-read MDC. It was very much like meeting old high school friends: you still speak the same, intimate language, but you can't help but noticing that they are not noticing you (and they) have aged. I was struck by the fact that the metaphysics presupposed in the piece is very much pre-Lewisian. Part-whole relations and modality are treated in a non-fine-grained manner. I don't say this to criticize MDC. But MDC is the product of a period in the philosophy of science where getting the details right in one's rejection of the D-N model or, say, Nagel-reduction are distracting attention away from what with knowledge of hindsight are more fundamental issues. So, in some possible world, MDC could have benefited from more engagement with post-Lewisian (and Lewisian!) metaphysics. But in so far as the sciences are exemplary models of rationality and knowledge, the folk in post-Lewisian metaphysics and epistemology can also benefit from more attention to the very rich literature in philosophy (and history) of (messy) scientific practices--who knows, it might even help create a cure for the widespread addiction to toy-examples and intuitions?
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