British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1 Charting the Territories of Epistemic Concepts in the Practice of Science: A Text-Mining Approach Christophe Malaterre (*) and Martin Léonard (*) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1413-6710 Abstract Much attention in philosophy of science has been devoted to explicating highly prized concepts such as explanation, theory, or model among many others, resulting in a plurality of nuanced philosophical accounts (e.g., for explanation: the DN-, causal-, unification- or mechanistic-accounts). The rationale for this enterprise is to be found in the central epistemic roles that such concepts are taken to play in science. Yet, do these concepts actually play such significant roles? In this contribution, we propose to investigate the actual usage of epistemic concepts in the practice of science by analysing terminological occurrence patterns in scientific publications. Narrowing down the study to six major epistemic concepts (theory, model, mechanism, explanation, understanding and prediction), we use text- mining methods to quantify actual terminological usage and relationships in a corpus of 73,771 full-text scientific articles of the biological and medical sciences (BioMed database). The resulting terminological cartographies partly validate select philosophical intuitions but also suggest notable differences between philosophical reconstructions and the actual roles that epistemic concepts appear to be playing in the scientific discourse. We also investigate the incidence of disciplinary context. 1. Introduction 2. Hypotheses, Methods, and Data 3. Corpus-Wide Epistemic Contexts 3.1. Model 3.2. Mechanism 3.3 Prediction 3,4. Understanding 3.5. Explanation 3.6. Theory 4. Epistemic Contexts Depending on Research Fields