Empirical philosophy of science: introducing qualitative methods into philosophy of science

Abstract

A growing number of philosophers of science make use of qualitative empirical data, a development that may reconfigure the relations between philosophy and sociology of science and that is reminiscent of efforts to integrate history and philosophy of science. Therefore, the first part of this introduction to the volume Empirical Philosophy of Science outlines the history of relations between philosophy and sociology of science on the one hand, and philosophy and history of science on the other. The second part of this introduction offers an overview of the papers in the volume, each of which is giving its own answer to questions such as: Why does the use of qualitative empirical methods benefit philosophical accounts of science? And how should these methods be used by the philosopher?