Is Philosophy Exceptional? A Corpus-Based, Quantitative Study

Drawing on the epistemology of logic literature anti-exceptionalism about logic, we set out to investigate following metaphilosophical questions empirically: Is philosophy special? Are its methods (dis)continuous with science? More specifically, test hypotheses philosophical deductivism, inductivism, and abductivism. Using indicator words classify arguments by type (namely, deductive, inductive, abductive arguments), searched through a large corpus texts mined from JSTOR database (N = 435,703) find patterns argumentation. The results our quantitative, corpus-based study suggest that deductive are significantly more common than inductive in overall, but they gradually steadily giving way non-deductive (i.e. abductive) academic philosophy.