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1198The 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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764Collaboration, 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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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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222Critical Notice: Kuhn, Conant and Everything—A Full or Fuller AccountPhilosophy of Science 68 (2): 258-262. 2001.
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220Scientific methodStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (-): -. 2015.1. Overview and organizing themes 2. Historical Review: Aristotle to Mill 3. Logic of method and critical responses 3.1 Logical constructionism and Operationalism 3.2. H-D as a logic of confirmation 3.3. Popper and falsificationism 3.4 Meta-methodology and the end of method 4. Statistical methods for hypothesis testing 5. Method in Practice 5.1 Creative and exploratory practices 5.2 Computer methods and the ‘third way’ of doing scie…Read more
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219The phenomenon of shared intention has received much attention in the philosophy of mind and action. Margaret Gilbert (1989, 2000c, 2014b) argues that a shared intention to do A consists in a joint commitment to intend to do A. But we need to know more about the nature of joint commitments to know what exactly this implies. While the persistence of joint commitments has received much attention in the literature, their impersistence has received very little attention. In this paper, we shed light…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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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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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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136Stabilizing and changing phenomenal worlds: Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn on scientific literatureJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 32 (1): 109-129. 2001.In the work of both Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn the scientific literature plays important roles for stability and change of scientific phenomenal worlds. In this article we shall introduce the analyses of scientific literature provided by Fleck and Kuhn, respectively. From this background we shall discuss the problem of how divergent thinking can emerge in a dogmatic atmosphere. We shall argue that in their accounts of the factors inducing changes of scientific phenomenal worlds Fleck and Kuhn …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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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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105On incommensurabilityStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 27 (1): 131-141. 1996.
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105How to recognize intruders in your nicheIn H. B. Andersen, F. V. Christiansen, K. F. Jørgensen & Vincent Hendriccks (eds.), The Way Through Science and Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Stig Andur Pedersen, College Publications. pp. 119-135. 2006.One important problem concerning incommensurability is how to explain that two theories which are incommensurable and therefore mutually untranslatable and incomparable in a strictly logical, point-by-point way are still competing. The two standard approaches have been to argue either that the terms of incommensurable theories may share reference, or that incommensurable theories target roughly the same object domain as far as the world-in-itself is concerned. However, neither of these approache…Read more
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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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90Kuhn on concepts and categorizationIn Thomas Nickles (ed.), Thomas Kuhn, Cambridge University Press. pp. 212--245. 2003.
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84Reference 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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80Incommensurability and Dynamic Conceptual StructuresPhilosophia Scientiae 8 (1): 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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789 Scientific Concepts and Conceptual ChangeIn Vasō Kintē & Theodore Arabatzis (eds.), Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions revisited, Routledge. pp. 179. 2012.
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75Epidemiological 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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73Categorization, anomalies and the discovery of nuclear fissionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 27 (4): 463-492. 1996.
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65Conceptual change and incommensurability: A cognitive-historical viewDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 32 (1): 111-152. 1997.
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65Within recent years, scientific misconduct has become an increasingly important topic, not only in the scientific community, but in the general public as well. Spectacular cases have been extensively covered in the news media, such as the cases of the Korean stem cell researcher Hwang, the German nanoscientist Schön, or the Norwegian cancer researcher Sudbø. In Science's latest annual "breakthrough of the year" report from December 2006, the descriptions of the year's hottest breakthroughs were …Read more
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64New Challenges to Philosophy of Science (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2013.This fourth volume of the Programme “The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective” deals with new challenges in this field. In this regard, it seeks to broaden the scope of the philosophy of science in two directions. On the one hand, ...
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58The role of testimony in mathematicsSynthese 199 (1-2): 859-870. 2020.Mathematicians appear to have quite high standards for when they will rely on testimony. Many mathematicians require that a number of experts testify that they have checked the proof of a result p before they will rely on p in their own proofs without checking the proof of p. We examine why this is. We argue that for each expert who testifies that she has checked the proof of p and found no errors, the likelihood that the proof contains no substantial errors increases because different experts w…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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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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44Many degree programs in science and engineering aim at enabling their students to perform interdisciplinary problem solving. In this paper we present three types of expertise that are involved in different ways in interdisciplinary problem solving. In doing so we shall first characterise two important epistemological challenges commonly faced in interdisciplinary problem solving, namely the communication challenge that arises from the use of different concepts within different scientific domains…Read more
Copenhagen, Denmark
Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |