Phil@Scale: Computational Methods within Philosophy

In this paper we report the results of Phil@Scale, a project directed at the development of computational methods for (the history of) philosophy. In this project, philosophers and computer scientists together created SalVe, a tool that helps philosophers answering text-based questions. SalVe has been tested successfully on the Wissenschaftslehre (1837), an extensive work by the Bohemian polymath Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848). Bolzano was a philosopher, mathematician and theologian whose work has been of fundamental importance for the development of Western logic and the foundation of sciences such as mathematics and computer science. The testing of SalVe on the Wissenschaftslehre reveals that with respect to certain questions within philosophy valuable contributions are obtained by applying even rather simple, well-known computational techniques. We conclude that there is definitely a future for computational methods within text-based philosophical research. We explain how SalVe can be used within philosophical research that relies on textual sources. We will start out with an explanation of our aims in developing SalVe and give a short description of SalVe’s functionalities, followed by a technical description of the tool. Then we will give a concrete example of how SalVe aids philosophical research. We conclude the paper with an evaluation of the potential of Digital Humanities tools for philosophy, and the challenges that face us if we wish to continue this development further. 1 Phil@Scale was part of the 2012 Academy Assistants project from the VU Network Institute, which is directed at combining expertise from ICT and the social sciences and humanities in order to create innovative technologies. In Phil@Scale, Sanne Vrijenhoek, a master student in Artificial Intelligence, developed the text-mining tool SalVe together with Pauline van Wierst, a master student in Philosophy, under the supervision of Arianna Betti (Philosophy) and Stefan Schlobach (Computer Science). To the project Hein van den Berg, Stefan Roski, Jeroen Smid (all Philosophy), Iris Loeb (Philosophy/Mathematics), Mariya Koleva (Computational Linguistics), Robin Brons (Liberal Arts & Sciences, University College Roosevelt), and Aron de Jong (Lifestyle Informatics) all contributed. See the Phil@Scale project at http://www.networkinstitute.org/academy-assistants/aaprojects/.