Special issue: Inferentialism in philosophy of science and in epistemology - introduction

Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of analytic philosophy in the last decades has been the relatively weak connections between two of its most important branches: epistemology and philosophy of science. Of course, it is not that these connections are inexistent, but even a casual reader of the major publications in these fields would not miss the fact that cross-references between them are not very common. In particular, one would expect that analytical epistemologists resorted more often to sophisticated scientific examples as a paradigm of what knowledge is and of how it is reached (since, after all, scientific knowledge is the product of our best and most systematic efforts to produce knowledge of the world), and that philosophers of science made a more frequent use of conceptual tools derived from epistemology in order to solve problems specifically posed by scientific theories, models, experiments, etc. Bayesianism has probably been the one school that has recently generated a fluent exchange of ideas and techniques between epistemologists and philosophers of science, but it remains a unique case, and also very committed to a particular way of understanding belief and learning, one that not everyone agrees with.