Patterns, Pathways &
Surprises

Max Noichl

2025-05-22

To follow along, visit www.maxnoichl.eu/talk

The plan

  • OpenAlex Mapper
  • Applications
  • Reflections

OpenAlex Mapper

https://m7n-openalex-mapper.hf.space

https://possible-life-project-openalex-mapper-strong-gpu.hf.space

The workflow of OpenAlex Mapper
Singh et al. (2023) McInnes, Healy, and Melville (2018) De Bruin ([2022] 2023)

Now, why is this useful for PhilSci?

  • Philosophers need to be acquainted with science.
  • Training, interviews, case studies, etc.
  • Problem: generalization, validation?
  • Answers questions of the form: “The Hopfield Model – where is it (really) a thing?”

Applications

Model templates – Debates about model transfer in science, model templates as a structuring principle orthogonal to disciplines.
Humphreys (2004) Knuuttila and Loettgers (2023)

Model templates – Distribution of the Kuramoto model across disciplines.
Knuuttila and Loettgers (2023)

Concepts – Distribution of concepts over large, interdisciplinary samples.
Malaterre, Chartier, and Lareau (2020) Zichert and Wüthrich (2024)

Methods – Relevant for debates on machine learning in science vs. class. statistics, theory free science.
Breiman (2001) Bzdok, Altman, and Krzywinski (2018) Andrews (2023)

Attention of HPS – 500k sources of the history and philosophy of science-literature.
Weingart (2015)

Journal Number of Papers
Isis 22858
Technology and Culture 13140
Journal of Philosophy 12806
Synthese 10484
Philosophy of Science 7432
British Journal for the History of Science 5810
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4380
Journal for the History of Astronomy 3194
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 2798
Annals of Science 2742
Social Studies of Science 2176
History of Science 1511
Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 1227
Archive for History of Exact Sciences 1088
Osiris 960
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 914
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 602

Reflections

Some qualifications

  • OpenAlex is not perfect
  • Our method right now only considers English
  • We’re limited to sources that include abstracts or speaking titles
  • Various UMAP-issues.

The proper role of comp. methods in PhilSci

Thank you!

Literature

Andrews, Mel. 2023. “The Devil in the Data: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal.” 2023.
Breiman, Leo. 2001. “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures.” Statistical Science 16 (3): 199–215. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2676681.
Bzdok, Danilo, Naomi Altman, and Martin Krzywinski. 2018. “Statistics Versus Machine Learning.” Nature Methods 15 (4): 233–34. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4642.
De Bruin, Jonathan. (2022) 2023. “PyAlex.” https://github.com/J535D165/pyalex.
Humphreys, Paul. 2004. Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method. Oxford University Press. https://books.google.com?id=ZIot7QGz7eEC.
Knuuttila, Tarja, and Andrea Loettgers. 2023. “Model Templates: Transdisciplinary Application and Entanglement.” Synthese 201 (6): 200. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04178-3.
Malaterre, Christophe, Jean-François Chartier, and Francis Lareau. 2020. “The Recipes of Philosophy of Science: Characterizing the Semantic Structure of Corpora by Means of Topic Associative Rules.” Plos One 15 (11): e0242353.
McInnes, Leland, John Healy, and James Melville. 2018. “UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction.” http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426.
Singh, Amanpreet, Mike D’Arcy, Arman Cohan, Doug Downey, and Sergey Feldman. 2023. “SciRepEval: A Multi-Format Benchmark for Scientific Document Representations.” November 13, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13308.
Weingart, Scott B. 2015. “Finding the History and Philosophy of Science.” Erkenntnis 80 (1): 201–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9621-1.
Zichert, Michael, and Adrian Wüthrich. 2024. “Tracing the Development of the Virtual Particle Concept Using Semantic Change Detection.” October 22, 2024. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.16855.