Hi Scott,
Thanks for the comments. Glad to know people are interested in this research. Some thoughts.
Christianity is not an ideology, it is a religion. One might say: religion > culture > ideology.
I’ve never been one to worry much about definitions. But I would probably put those words in a different order, at least in my understanding of human behavior.
Start with culture. It is everything that we do … the entire corpus of ideas and behaviors that constitute a society. Culture’s always have an ideological component (or many ideological components). Historically, religion (i.e. belief in a supernatural God) was the most important ideology. Today, the dominant ideology is secular.
To your main point, yes counting words is a very crude way of capturing an ideology. Counting words is not a substitute for actually reading and engaging with ideas. That said, we can do far more expansive analysis with word frequency that would be possible by reading the actual literature. I mean like 10 order of magnitude more data. I think there’s something to be said for that breadth.
Am I overstating or misreading if I seem to observe the thesis weighs the words in question equally
Yes and know. To define jargon, I weight words by their relative frequency in the text corpus. To count the frequency of this jargon in mainstream English, I just sum the relative frequency of these jargon words. Different jargon words contribute differently to the sum, based on their own frequency.
Note that I also use a different measure called the language similarity index. This measures the similarity of the entire corpus. So it absolutely does not weight each word equally.
Is it possible for language to be mere data? If I survey the contents of my room and notice many books and one wife must I conclude the books are more valuable?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Anything can be ‘mere data’. It’s what we do with the data the gives meaning. The point with word frequency is that it reveals what we’re talking about. From there, we can infer values … but with obvious difficulties. For example, I might talk a great deal about wars because I abhor them, not because I like them.
The Church (and hence Christianity) has had much to say than simply Biblical texts on a wide range of topics, including economics. I wonder why you limited your sample source to Biblical texts.
Very true. Likewise, economists have much to say other than what is in undergrad textbooks. But we have to start somewhere. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the Bible is the core of the Christian canon, or that econ textbooks are the core of the economics canon. If we want’ to do more nuanced analysis, we can select different parts of the canon.
On that front, something I’ve been meaning to do is digitize the Real-World Economics Review catalogue and see how the frequency of heterodox jargon has changed over time.