Epistemological stereotypes and scientific method

In this article, we propose a new kind of stereotype, which we call «epistemological stereotype». Our hypothesis is that philosophy-of-science typical debates concern issues that are implicit in scienti c research, that is, in the back- ground of assumptions of researchers in different disciplines. We tried to nd them by analyzing the possible stereotypes, namely, implicit category and categorization related to philosophy-of-science debates, such as realism/antirealism or reduction- ism/emergence. In order to do that, we used IAT (Implicit Association Test) method, a tool from the social psychology, usually exploited in detecting stereotypes, and we carried out an experiment on subjects that are target of our study: researchers from different scienti c elds. In the nal part of the paper, we discuss the prelimi- nary results, which show a tendency con rming our hypothesis, and we draw some closing remarks concerning the possible repercussions of epistemological stereo- types on scienti c methodology and research.