•  4
    There is a growing concern for the proper role of science within democratic societies, which has led to the development of new science policies for the implementation of social responsibility in research. Although the very expression ‘social responsibility of science’ may be interpreted in different ways, many of these emerging policy frameworks define it, at least in part, as a form of anticipative reflection about the potential impacts of research in society. What remains a rather under-discus…Read more
  •  194
    Beyond Structure: New Frontiers of the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (2): 81-86. 2023.
    Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, while his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is regarded as one of the most influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the same time, however, his place within philosophy of science remains ambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, there is no proper ‘Kuhnian school of thought’ in HPS. On the other hand, the interest towards Kuhn does not seem …Read more
  •  407
    The interdisciplinarity revolution
    Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 34 (2): 237. 2019.
    Contemporary interdisciplinary research is often described as bringing some important changes in the structure and aims of the scientific enterprise. Sometimes, it is even characterized as a sort of Kuhnian scientific revolution. In this paper, the analogy between interdisciplinarity and scientific revolutions will be analysed. It will be suggested that the way in which interdisciplinarity is promoted looks similar to how new paradigms were described and defended in some episodes of revolutionar…Read more
  •  360
    Formal models of the scientific community and the value-ladenness of science
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (4): 1-23. 2021.
    In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed several formal models of the social organisation of science. While their robustness and representational adequacy has been analysed at length, the function of these models has begun to be discussed in more general terms only recently. In this article, I will interpret many of the current formal models of the scientific community as representing the latest development of what I will call the ‘Kuhnian project’. These models share with Ku…Read more
  •  37
    Taxonomies, Networks, and Lexicons: A Study of Kuhn’s Post-‘Linguistic Turn’ Philosophy
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 33 (2): 87-103. 2020.
    In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual n…Read more
  •  230
    The Distribution of Ethical Labor in the Scientific Community
    Journal of Responsible Innovation 7 263-279. 2020.
    To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their eng…Read more
  •  68
    Susan Wolf maintains that the meaningfulness of a life arises when someone acts upon the subjective desire of doing something objectively valuable. This amounts to a hybrid view, which contains both subjectivist and objectivist elements. Wolf’s tentative definition of what is objectively valuable amounts to what, in this article, we define as ‘intersubjectivism’. As it will be argued, however, intersubjectivism poses a number of problems, which are exacerbated in contemporary society and which s…Read more
  •  81
    Specialisation and the Incommensurability Among Scientific Specialties
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (1): 129-144. 2019.
    In his mature writings, Kuhn describes the process of specialisation as driven by a form of incommensurability, defined as a conceptual/linguistic barrier which promotes and guarantees the insularity of specialties. In this paper, we reject the idea that the incommensurability among scientific specialties is a linguistic barrier. We argue that the problem with Kuhn’s characterisation of the incommensurability among specialties is that he presupposes a rather abstract theory of semantic incommens…Read more
  •  14
    Guest editor’s introduction
    Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 34 (2): 167. 2019.
  •  848
    Specialisation, Interdisciplinarity, and Incommensurability
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 31 (3): 301-317. 2017.
    Incommensurability may be regarded as driving specialisation, on the one hand, and as posing some problems to interdisciplinarity, on the other hand. It may be argued, however, that incommensurability plays no role in either specialisation or interdisciplinarity. Scientific specialties could be defined as simply 'different' (that is, about different things), rather than 'incommensurable' (that is, competing for the explanation of the same phenomena). Interdisciplinarity could be viewed as the co…Read more
  •  28
    Current Controversies in Values and Science (review)
    Metapsychology Online Reviews 21 (42). 2017.
    Book Review of Current Controversies in Values and Science, Kevin C. Elliott and Daniel Steel (Editors), Routledge, 2017
  •  760
    In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the gro…Read more
  •  13
    Both in the bibliography and in the citation in the text, Michelle Gibbons’ article below has been mistakenly attributed to “Gibson.” The proper reference to the article should be: Gibbons, M.. Reassessing discovery: Rosalind Franklin, scientific visualization, and the structure of DNA. _Philosophy of Science, 79_, 63–80.
  •  580
    Natural Kinds, Causes and Domains: Khalidi on how science classifies things
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 54 132-137. 2015.
    Natural Categories and Human Kinds is a recent and timely contribution to current debate on natural kinds. Because of the growing sophistication of this debate, it is necessary to make careful distinctions in order to appreciate the originality of Khalidi’s position. Khalidi’s view on natural kinds is naturalistic: if we want to know what Nature’s joints really are, we should look at the actual carving job carried out by our best scientific practices. Like LaPorte, Khalidi is a fallibilist: our …Read more