Philosophy Conceptual analysis and the world wide web
How search engines can help us test our philosophical theories.
If digitalization continues at the current rate, we will soon be able to test some of our philosophical theories on electronic text- and data collections. In recent years, this development has been observed — on a small scale — in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. In these disciplines, proponents of the data-based approach investigate concepts like 'knowledge', 'memory', and 'fact' by analyzing their occurrences in actual (written or spoken) language, e.g. in newspaper articles, the world wide web, or in television shows. In doing so, they benefit from the increasing size and diversity of these data sets as well as from their improving annotation and searchability.
To maximally profit from these achievements, philosophers need not only a good mastery of data-based methods, but also a solid working knowledge in theoretical linguistics. In this respect, it may well be that digitalization brings about a second linguistic turn in philosophy.