Textual Analysis and Conceptual Cartography
(2025) Methods in the Philosophy of Science: A User’s Guide — ISBN: [9780262552240], p. 443-461, published
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- Abstract
- At first blush, it might seem as though digital approaches could provide us with precisely the kind of input we need to perform something like conceptual analysis in the philosophy of science: querying the expressed intuitions of the “folk” (here, practicing scientists publishing in the journal literature) to see how they put various concepts to use, to which cases they believe they can be applied, etc. In this chapter, I want to nuance this argument, both by clarifying what we might mean by “conceptual analysis” in this case and by tempering expectations about what digital approaches could be reasonably expected to give us. I claim that such a more moderate goal, which I’ll call here “conceptual cartography,” can still provide the philosophy of science with a number of advantages (which are otherwise difficult to attain), while avoiding the possibility of making promises that we can’t fulfill.
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Citations
Pence, C. (2025). Textual Analysis and Conceptual Cartography. In Sophie Veigl and Adrian Currie (ed.), Methods in the Philosophy of Science: A User’s Guide (p. p. 443-461). MIT Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/248977