Amid all this talk about whether economics is a science, I began to wonder about philosophy. Not only do we have our own Nobel Prize, but most of us spend our days testing hypotheses, and even making (all too easily) falsifiable predictions (e.g. about what sort of intuitions rational beings will have under various counterfactual circumstances). There is furthermore a lot of circumstantial evidence that we're scientists. Many of us spend our time hanging around semi-reputable folks like linguists and psychologists, and even topics that have no prima facie connections to anything reputable, upon closer investigation, are in fact linked in fairly obvious ways to the most respected disciplines of all. Indeed, over the course of my career, I've been surprised to see how the most abstractly metaphysical topics originally discussed by philosophers have come to impact a variety of clearly empirical disciplines outside philosophy. Work by philosophers on the metaphysics of modality (or the semantics for modal languages) resulted in a model that has useful applicability in a wide variety of topics (e.g. the study of probability, the study of natural language meaning). Philosophers nursed the notion of causation while it was hiding from anti-metaphysical forces, and now it is a respectable topic again in the human sciences (e.g. no discussion of practical reasoning can ignore it). Psychologists interested in concept formation appeal to work in metaphysics as abstract as David Wiggins and Michael Ayers on sortal concepts (to the great chagrin of some of my colleagues). Some of us are even quite explicit about the fact that we do experiments. It is not just in my Quinean moments that I wonder how to make a distinction between philosophy and 'real' science.

   -Jason Stanley