The entrenched self-conception of analytic philosophy as intrinsically wedded to formal logic has long functioned as a legitimating mythos within twentieth-century intellectual history; yet a rigorous quantitative interrogation of five flagship journals between 1941 and 2010 decisively unsettles this orthodoxy. Through systematic corpus analysis, the study reconstructs the empirical footprint of logic according to three calibrated indices: presence, functional role, and technical sophistication. Strikingly, nearly three-quarters of the surveyed articles exhibit no substantive logical content, thereby challenging the narrative of ubiquitous formalism. Where logic does appear, it predominantly serves an instrumental rather than constitutive function, deployed as a clarificatory apparatus rather than as the architectonic core of argumentation. Although the data indicate a gradual increase in formal complexity over time, the overall level of technical elaboration remains comparatively modest, undermining claims of pervasive mathematical rigour. A salient case synthesis drawn from mid-century philosophy of language illustrates this pattern: symbolic notation is frequently invoked to regiment arguments, yet rarely elaborated into fully fledged proof-theoretic frameworks. The cumulative evidence compels a reconceptualisation of analytic philosophy not as a monolithic enterprise of formal derivation, but as a heterogeneous practice in which logical method operates contingently and often superficially. Consequently, the so-called prevailing view collapses under empirical scrutiny, inviting a more historically nuanced and methodologically pluralistic account of the discipline’s evolution. Bonino, G., Maffezioli, P. and Tripodi, P. (2021) ‘Logic in analytic philosophy’, Synthese, 198(11), pp. 10991–11028. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48692753
