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272Kuhn's mature philosophy of science and cognitive psychologyPhilosophical Psychology 9 (3). 1996.Drawing on the results of modem psychology and cognitive science we suggest that the traditional theory of concepts is no longer tenable, and that the alternative account proposed by Kuhn may now be seen to have independent empirical support quite apart from its success as part of an account of scientific change. We suggest that these mechanisms can also be understood as special cases of general cognitive structures revealed by cognitive science. Against this background, incommensurability is no…Read more
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151Epistemic dependence in interdisciplinary groupsSynthese 190 (11): 1881-1898. 2013.In interdisciplinary research scientists have to share and integrate knowledge between people and across disciplinary boundaries. An important issue for philosophy of science is to understand how scientists who work in these kinds of environments exchange knowledge and develop new concepts and theories across diverging fields. There is a substantial literature within social epistemology that discusses the social aspects of scientific knowledge, but so far few attempts have been made to apply the…Read more
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25Book reviews (review)International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (3). 2007.This Article does not have an abstract
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105EDWIN H.-C. HUNG Beyond Kuhn. Scientific Explanation, Theory Structure, Incommensurability and Physical Necessity (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (1): 237-239. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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21On KuhnWadsworth. 2001.This brief text assists students in understanding Kuhn's philosophy and thinking so they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content. Part of the Wadsworth Notes Series, (which will eventually consist of approximately 100 titles, each focusing on a single "thinker" from ancient times to the present), ON KUHN is written by a philosopher deeply versed in the philosophy of this key thinker. Like other books in the series, this concis…Read more
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8Incommensurability and Dynamic Conceptual StructuresPhilosophia Scientiae 8 153-168. 2004.Un problème important à propos de l’incommensurabilité est d’expliquer comment des théories qui sont incommensurables peuvent néanmoins entrer en compétition. Dans cet article, on examine brièvement le compte rendu kuhnien de la différence entre transitions conceptuelles révolutionnaires et non révolutionnaires. On argue que l’approche taxonomique kuhnienne et le principe de non-recouvrement qui le sous-tend ne suffisent pas à distinguer entre ces deux types de transition. On montre que cette ap…Read more
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765Collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and the epistemology of contemporary scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 56 1-10. 2016.Over the last decades, science has grown increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary and has come to depart in important ways from the classical analyses of the development of science that were developed by historically inclined philosophers of science half a century ago. In this paper, I shall provide a new account of the structure and development of contemporary science based on analyses of, first, cognitive resources and their relations to domains, and second of the distribution of cogni…Read more
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304Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions and cognitive psychologyPhilosophical Psychology 11 (1). 1998.In a previous article we have shown that Kuhn's theory of concepts is independently supported by recent research in cognitive psychology. In this paper we propose a cognitive re-reading of Kuhn's cyclical model of scientific revolutions: all of the important features of the model may now be seen as consequences of a more fundamental account of the nature of concepts and their dynamics. We begin by examining incommensurability, the central theme of Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, accordi…Read more
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134The Cognitive Structure of Scientific RevolutionsCambridge University Press. 2006.Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions became the most widely read book about science in the twentieth century. His terms 'paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' entered everyday speech, but they remain controversial. In the second half of the twentieth century, the new field of cognitive science combined empirical psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. In this book, the theories of concepts developed by cognitive scientists are used to evaluate and extend Kuhn's most influent…Read more
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36Learning by ostension: Thomas Kuhn on science educationScience & Education 9 (1-2): 91-106. 2000.Significant claims about science education form an integral part of Thomas Kuhn's philosophy. Since the late 1950s, when Kuhn started wrestling with the ideas of ‘normal research’ and ‘convergent thought’, the nature of science education has played an important role in his argument. Hence, the nature of science education is an essential aspect of the phase-model of scientific development developed in his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, just as his later work on categories and con…Read more
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44Empirical Philosophy of Science: Introducing Qualitative Methods into Philosophy of Science (edited book)Springer International Publishing. 2015.The book examines the emerging approach of using qualitative methods, such as interviews and field observations, in the philosophy of science. Qualitative methods are gaining popularity among philosophers of science as more and more scholars are resorting to empirical work in their study of scientific practices. At the same time, the results produced through empirical work are quite different from those gained through the kind of introspective conceptual analysis more typical of philosophy. This…Read more
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65Conceptual change and incommensurability: A cognitive-historical viewDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 32 (1): 111-152. 1997.
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44Conceptual Development and Dynamic RealismStudia Philosophica Estonica 5 (2): 133-151. 2012.This paper focuses on Thomas S. Kuhn's work on taxonomic concepts and how it relates to empirical work from the cognitive sciences on categorization and conceptual development. I shall first review the basic features of Kuhn's family resemblance account and compare to work from the cognitive sciences. I shall then show how Kuhn's account can be extended to cover the development of new taxonomies in science, and I shall illustrate by a detailed case study that Kuhn himself mentioned only briefly …Read more
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29Women in the History of Philosophy of Science: What We Do and Do Not KnowHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (1): 136-139. 2013.
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86Reference and resemblanceProceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2001 (3). 2001.Many discussions between realists and non-realists have centered on the issue of reference, especially whether there is referential stability during theory change. In this paper, I shall summarize the debate, sketching the problems that remain within the two opposing positions, and show that both have ended on their own slippery slope, sliding away from their original position toward that of their opponents. In the search for a viable intermediate position, I shall then suggest an account of ref…Read more
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110Joint Acceptance and Scientific Change: A Case StudyEpisteme 7 (3): 248-265. 2010.Recently, several scholars have argued that scientists can accept scientific claims in a collective process, and that the capacity of scientific groups to form joint acceptances is linked to a functional division of labor between the group members. However, these accounts reveal little about how the cognitive content of the jointly accepted claim is formed, and how group members depend on each other in this process. In this paper, I shall therefore argue that we need to link analyses of joint ac…Read more
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222Critical Notice: Kuhn, Conant and Everything—A Full or Fuller AccountPhilosophy of Science 68 (2): 258-262. 2001.
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41Scientific ChangeInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.Scientific Change How do scientific theories, concepts and methods change over time? Answers to this question have historical parts and philosophical parts. There can be descriptive accounts of the recorded differences over time of particular theories, concepts, and methods—what might be called the shape of scientific change. Many stories of scientific change attempt to give […]
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1216The Second Essential Tension: on Tradition and Innovation in Interdisciplinary ResearchTopoi 32 (1): 3-8. 2013.In his analysis of “the essential tension between tradition and innovation” Thomas S. Kuhn focused on the apparent paradox that, on the one hand, normal research is a highly convergent activity based upon a settled consensus, but, on the other hand, the ultimate effect of this tradition-bound work has invariably been to change the tradition. Kuhn argued that, on the one hand, without the possibility of divergent thought, fundamental innovation would be precluded. On the other hand, without a str…Read more
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155Nomic concepts, frames, and conceptual changePhilosophy of Science 67 (3): 241. 2000.Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published at the beginning of what has come to be known as “the cognitive revolution.” With hindsight one can construct significant parallels between the problems of knowledge, perception, and learning with which Kuhn and cognitive scientists were grappling and between the accounts developed by each. However, by and large Kuhn never utilized the research in cognitive science—especially in cognitive psychology—that we believe would have fu…Read more
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76Epidemiological studies of chronic diseases began around the mid-20th century. Contrary to the infectious disease epidemiology which had prevailed at the beginning of the 20th century and which had focused on single agents causing individual diseases, the chronic disease epidemiology which emerged at the end of Word War II was a much more complex enterprise that investigated a multiplicity of risk factors for each disease. Involved in the development of chronic disease epidemi-ology were therefo…Read more
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31Conceptual Development in Interdisciplinary ResearchIn Uljana Feest & Friedrich Steinle (eds.), Scientific Concepts and Investigative Practice, De Gruyter. pp. 271-292. 2012.
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90Kuhn on concepts and categorizationIn Thomas Nickles (ed.), Thomas Kuhn, Cambridge University Press. pp. 212--245. 2003.
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12Reference and ResemblancePhilosophy of Science 68 (S3). 2001.Many discussions between realists and non-realists have centered on the issue of reference, especially whether there is referential stability during theory change. In this paper, I shall summarize the debate, sketching the problems that remain within the two opposing positions, and show that both have ended on their own slippery slope, sliding away from their original position toward that of their opponents. In the search for a viable intermediate position, I shall then suggest an account of ref…Read more
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143Kuhn's account of family resemblance: A solution to the problem of wide-open textureErkenntnis 52 (3): 313-337. 2000.It is a commonly raised argument against the family resemblance account of concepts that there is no limit to a concept's extension. An account of family resemblance which attempts to provide a solution to this problem by including both similarity among instances and dissimilarity to non-instances has been developed by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. Similar solutions have been hinted at in the literature on family resemblance concepts, but the solution has never received a detailed inve…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |