ABSTRACT
Philosophers of science or of the social sciences incline to one of two roles, although the dividing line is not strict. First, there are “commentators”, who largely restrict themselves to analysing the doings of others: be they scientists or investigators. Such commentaries – critical, clarificatory, cautionary, diagnostic, evaluative and sometimes hortative – may indeed prove useful to the worker-bees they study. Second, there are (a smaller number) of philosophers of science who explicitly define their role as “under-labouring” for a given discipline(s), by supplying an explanatory programme, a toolkit of concepts and, very occasionally, an illustrative model to guide practitioners.
