Epistemic markers in the scientific discourse

Abstract

The central role of such epistemic concepts as theory, explanation, model, or mechanism is rarely questioned in philosophy of science. Yet, what is their actual use in the practice of science? Here we deploy text-mining methods to investigate the usage of 61 epistemic notions in a corpus of full-text articles from the biological and biomedical sciences (N=73,771). The influence of disciplinary context is also examined by splitting the corpus into sub-disciplinary clusters. The results reveal the intricate semantic networks that these concepts actually form in the scientific discourse, not always following our intuitions, at least in some parts of science.