The use of scientific methods and models in the philosophy of science

What is the relation between philosophy of science and the sciences? As Pradeu et al. (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science https://doi.org/10.1086/715518 , 2021) and Khelfaoui et al. (Synthese 199:6219, 2021) recently show, part of this relation is constituted by “philosophy in science”: the use of philosophical methods to address questions in the sciences. But another part is what one might call “science in philosophy”: the use of methods drawn from the sciences to tackle philosophical questions. In this paper, we focus on one class of such methods and examine the role that model-based methods play within “science in philosophy”. To do this, we first build a bibliographic coupling network with Web of Science records of all papers published in philosophy of science journals from 2000 to 2020 ( $$N=9217$$ N = 9217 ). After detecting the most prominent communities of papers in the network, we use a supervised classifier to identify all papers that use model-based methods. Drawing on work in cultural evolution, we also propose a model to represent the evolution of methods in each one of these communities. Finally, we measure the strength of cultural selection for model-based methods during the given time period by integrating model and data. Results indicate not only that model-based methods have had a significant presence in philosophy of science over the last two decades, but also that there is considerable variation in their use across communities. Results further indicate that some communities have experienced strong selection for the use of model-based methods but that other have not; we validate this finding with a logistic regression of paper methodology on publication year. We conclude by discussing some implications of our findings and suggest that model-based methods play an increasingly important role within “science in philosophy” in some but not all areas of philosophy of science.