Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
Although philosophers of science have always been interested in the actual work of scientists, there has been a strong turn in the last generation away from prescribing how science ought ideally to proceed and toward studying more carefully how science has proceeded. In part this turn has been a reaction to previous work in philosophy of science, which to many seemed misguided and largely irrelevant to the sciences. In part this change reflects a general scepticism about the possibility of doing traditional foundationalist epistemology. Such scepticism is itself a reaction to the failure of the foundationalist program of the logical empiricists. The contemporary turn toward careful empirical study of the sciences constitutes a new program for the philosophy of science, which I shall call ‘empirical philosophy of science’ or ‘the empirical approach to the philosophy of science’.
I am indebted to Philip Ehrlich, Michael Gardner, Jonathan Lieberson, Stephen Stich and Paul Thagard for criticism of earlier versions and to unpublished work of Dudley Shapere.