
Hanne AndersenUniversity of Copenhagen · Department of Science Education
Hanne Andersen
PhD
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72
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Introduction
My primary research focus is on the historical development and structural conditions of 20th and 21st century science, broadly construed. In examining science as it is practiced, I integrate historical and contemporary case studies with analytical tools drawn from general philosophy of science, social epistemology, and research ethics.
Additional affiliations
May 2015 - present
July 2014 - present
August 2009 - June 2011
Publications
Publications (72)
The first reference on rationality that integrates accounts from psychology and philosophy, covering descriptive and normative theories from both disciplines.
Both analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology have made dramatic advances in understanding rationality, but there has been little interaction between the disciplines. This volume offers t...
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...
How can research be distinguished from public debate or from nonsense? This question has kept arising in public debates about controversial research topics, for example in debates on Lomborg’s publications on climate and environmental science in the early 2000s, or, more recently, in debates on research on diversity and identity. This article will...
This paper presents current work in philosophy of science in practice that focusses on practices that are detrimental to the production of scientific knowledge. The paper argues that philosophy of scientific malpractice both provides an epistemological complement to research ethics in understanding scientific misconduct and questionable research pr...
The “practice turn” in philosophy of science has strengthened the connections between philosophy and scientific practice. Apart from reinvigorating philosophy of science, this also increases the relevance of philosophical research for science, society, and science education. In this paper, we reflect on our extensive experience with teaching mandat...
Systems sciences address issues that cross-cut any single discipline and benefit from the synergy of combining several approaches. But interdisciplinary integration can be challenging to achieve in practice. Scientists with different disciplinary backgrounds often have different views on what count as good data, good evidence, a good model, or a go...
Med denne sætning indledes Thomas S. Kuhns klassiker Videnskabens Revolutioner fra 1962, der mere end noget andet værk er kommet til at stå som indledningen til en historisk orienteret videnskabsteori. Kuhn gjorde sig her til talsmand for, at historiske undersøgelser kunne have betydning for videnskabsteorien - men vel at mærke historiske under...
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 develo...
A growing number of philosophers of science make use of qualitative empirical data, a development that may reconfigure the relations between philosophy and sociology of science and that is reminiscent of efforts to integrate history and philosophy of science. Therefore, the first part of this introduction to the volume Empirical Philosophy of Scien...
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 produc...
Many 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 in...
Several high‐profile cases of research misconduct during the past decade have explicitly raised the question whether co‐authors share responsibility for scientific misconduct perpetrated by a collaborator. There is no clear answer though, as different cases of misconduct differ in terms of how the co‐authors were involved in the work. Nonetheless,...
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 substantia...
Philosophy of science has had little focus on malpractices in science such as intentional fraud or gross negligence. Complementing the ethical literature on intentional deceit, this paper will focus on the epistemological issues of scientific misconduct. I shall start from the premise that collaborating scientists very often need to trust their col...
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 ext...
This volume is a serious attempt to open up the subject of European philosophy of science to real thought, and provide the structural basis for the interdisciplinary development of its specialist fields, but also to provoke reflection on the idea of ‘European philosophy of science’. This efforts should foster a contemporaneous reflection on what mi...
(1) Rescher’s processual account of science depicts scientific inquiry as an epitome of the processual nature of knowledge. On this view, science is not seen as a body of theories, but as a process, as an ongoing venture in inquiry whose products are ever changing. (2) Traditionally within philosophy of science, discussions of the development of sc...
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 a...
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 i...
In June 1934 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi published a paper in Nature entitled “Possible Production of Elements of Atomic
Number higher than 92” (Fermi, 1934b). In this paper Fermi reported that by bombarding uranium with neutrons he and his team
had produced an element which could be element number 93, that is, a transuranic element.
Two ob...
Nuclear fission is a process in which a heavy nucleus splits into two much lighter nuclei. For some very unstable nuclei fission can happen spontaneously, but that is a very rare event. Usually, the process is induced by the excitation of the nuclei by bombarding them with particles or with gamma rays. Heavy nuclei have a greater neutron/proton rat...
In his Report (“Electronic publication and the narrowing of science and scholarship,” 18 July, p. [395][1]), J. A. Evans states that “[b]y enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus,” and he warns that there may
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing . Richard Dawkins, Ed. . Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008. 437 pp. $34.95, £20. ISBN 9780199216802.
These selections from writings by researchers over the past century cover such topics as what scientists study, who they are, what they think, and what they find delight in.
This paper focuses on implicit normative considerations underlying scientific advice -- those normative questions, decisions, or issues that scientific advisers and the general public are not fully aware of but that nevertheless have implications for the character of the advice given. Using nutritional science as an example, we identify three such...
In attempting to answer the question why it was H. C. Ørsted (1777–1851) who discovered electromagnetism, historians of science
have discussed whether Ørsted was influenced by Schelling’s Naturphilosophie or rather by Kant’s philosophy. Thus, R. C. Stauffer and L. P. Williams have seen Ørsted’s discovery of electromagnetism
as closely related to th...
Within 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 researc...
Epidemiological 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 e...
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 sc...
The epidemiological literature contains an ongoing and diversified discussion of the Hill criteria. This article offers a philosophical analysis of the criteria, showing that the criteria are related to two different views of causality. The authors argue that the criteria of strength, specificity, consistency, experiment, and biological gradient ar...
One important problem concerning incommensurability is to explain how theories that are incommensurable can nevertheless compete. In this paper I shall briefly review Kuhn’s account of the difference between revolutionary and non-revolutionary conceptual developments. I shall argue that his taxonomic approach and the no-overlap principle it entails...
In 1997, the American neurologist and biochemist Stanley B. Prusiner received the Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of ‘prions’ - a new biological principle of infection. Preceding this discovery lies a complicated history of the research on a number of neurodegenerative diseases, including the sheep disease scrapie. During the 1960s, resea...
Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become somethin...
In this paper I shall compare and integrate some of the various historical, philosophical and cognitive accounts of scientific taxonomies. First, I shall present a family resemblance account of taxonomic concepts. Next, I shall give a brief overview of the research on taxonomies and family resemblance. I shall discuss the role of model-based reason...
For centuries, reductionism has been the subject of much discussion among scientists and philosophers, and has come to be an integral part of modern science. In its strongest form the world may be seen as a series of reductive levels: social groups, multicellular living things, cells, molecules, atoms, and finally as the smallest parts the elementa...
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...
Critique de l'ouvrage de S. Fuller intitule «Thomas Kuhn: une histoire philosophique de notre epoque» (2000), qui bouleverse l'evolution des etudes scientifiques au profit d'une approche contextuelle de l'oeuvre de T. Kuhn.
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...
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...
It is a commonly raised argument against thefamily resemblance account of concepts that, on thisaccount, there is no limit to a concept's extension.An account of family resemblance which attempts toprovide a solution to this problem by including bothsimilarity among instances and dissimilarity tonon-instances has been developed by the philosopher o...
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 p...
The characteristics of scientific revolutions and the question of which events in the history of science deserve the name of revolutionary are controversial themes in the philosophy of science. In this article Thomas Kuhn's characterization of scientific revolutions based on his theory of concepts is discussed, and the discovery of nuclear fission...
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...
The characteristics of scientific revolutions and by the same token the question of which events in the history of science deserve the name of revolutionary are controversial themes in the philosophy of science. An issue of disagreement is the question of whether or not events in which only parts of a paradigm are overthrown can truly be called a r...
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 ca...
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,...