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?
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Notes
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While qualitative methods have gradually been adopted by many fields outside sociology, the methods themselves have also developed (for histories of how qualitative methods have developed and been received, see Denzin and Lincoln (2000), Vidich and Lyman (1994), Brinkmann et al. (2014)). The idea of qualitative methods as it is used today was established during the 1960s and 1970s when the first handbooks, textbooks and specialized journals focused on qualitative methods appeared (see e.g. Glaser and Strauss 1967; Filstead 1970; Bogdan and Taylor 1975). During the 1980s, they were increasingly adopted within psychology, educational research and areas such as nursing science, and a decade later in health care research more generally.
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Wagenknecht, S., Nersessian, N.J., Andersen, H. (2015). Empirical Philosophy of Science: Introducing Qualitative Methods into Philosophy of Science. In: Wagenknecht, S., Nersessian, N., Andersen, H. (eds) Empirical Philosophy of Science. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18600-9_1
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