Philosophy of science has developed immensely over the last half century. Subspecializations focused on particular scientific disciplines as well as generalist turns towards naturalization, practice, and engagement, not to mention an increasing internationalization, have all contributed to changing the practices of how philosophy of science is produced, published, and received, and to changing the relations between philosophy, philosophy of science, and science itself. This contribution to the Festschrift compiled in honor of Professor Finn Collin provides a brief sketch of these (...) developments as seen through the prism of how Finn Collin as both a philosopher and a philosopher of science has contributed to these developments, nationally and internationally. (shrink)

In the book Science Studies as Naturalized Philosophy, Finn Collin deals with a long-term tendency toward conflict between, on the one hand, a philosophical understanding of scientific cognition and, on the other hand, the empirical science studies that include the cognitive content of sciences as an explanandum. Collin singles out Robert Merton as an advocate of a division of labor that avoids this conflict by delimiting the sociology of science to deal only with the social framework and genesis of science, (...) leaving it to philosophy and epistemology to investigate the justification of truth value and demarcation criteria. In this article, I will focus on Merton’s cudos norms and illuminate their meta-theoretical basis through the inclusion of Habermas’s ideas about rationality, the ‘ideal speech situation,’ his formal pragmatics, and his use of rational reconstruction. I discuss whether this can be considered ‘naturalized philosophy.’. (shrink)

I argue that meaning is a result of our biological evolution, and that language evolved from primates’ ability to grasp conceptually the most important features of their environment. I hold that natural selection and adaptation ensure that primates both sense and conceptualize their world similarly, and that they therefore think similarly, whenever they receive the same sense impressions. This cognitive similarity enabled our predecessors to learn and develop a language because of the regular association of a particular sound and a (...) particular image. The evolutionary pressure on our predecessors to develop a language was the advantage that such a language had for cooperation and survival. Finally, I argue that the old, but in wider circles frowned-upon theory of meaning, the expressive theory of language, provides the best explanation of the relationship between thought, meaning, and words, because it operates with words and not sentences as the basic semantic unit. (shrink)

Finn Collin has been the honest broker of social epistemology. In this article, I attempt to come clean on the nature and sources of what I have always regarded as the ‘normative’ horizon of the field. It basically turns on a social constructivist reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, the dialogue from which modern analytic epistemology also takes its inspiration. I pursue the implications of this approach in various normative fields of philosophy.

I first present the rudiments of the knowability paradox and state it in the usual formal style. Second, I present my intuition that it is not a paradox at all: it does not involve the contradiction it allegedly implies. Third, I point out where the argument for the paradox goes wrong.

This paper explores the implications of conceptual entropy in interdisciplinary collaboration, examining perspectives from philosophy and contemporary social science. Conceptual entropy, the degree of disorder in a conceptual system, is analyzed from the viewpoints of those advocating for reducing ambiguity to achieve scientific precision, as well as those advocating for embracing ambiguity to reflect real-world complexity. We aim to demonstrate the need for conceptual clarity and thereby criticize deliberate conceptual vagueness. Semantic vagueness may arise due to fuzzy ontological mechanisms guarding (...) the relevant object domain. However, vagueness may also result from the unwarranted use of metaphors. We address the risk of precision loss in interdisciplinary teams by proposing a framework for studying conceptual entropy. On this basis, we argue that ‘conceptual entropy’ is useful for reflecting on how unclear, messy, and ambivalent concepts and conceptual systems may lead to an accelerating state of semantic disorder and vagueness. (shrink)

On the occasion of the seventy-fifth birthday of Professor Dr. Phil. Finn Collin—whom I warmly congratulate while wishing him many more fruitful years of retirement—I would like to cast a glance back at one of his predecessors, Frithiof Brandt (1892–1968). Brandt held the position of professor in philosophy and psychology at the University of Copenhagen from 1922 to 1958. Today, Brandt is largely forgotten, but during his lifetime, he was a significant figure in Danish philosophy and psychology, and especially in (...) Danish cultural life. (shrink)

On several occasions, Finn Collin has engaged in discussions surrounding social constructivism, a relatively recent theoretical orientation emerging through the development of naturalized science studies from the 1970s. Inspired by Finn’s work, this paper explores the distinction between ‘social constructivism’ and ‘social constructionism’ and their origins in various strands of the sociology of knowledge.

This article investigates recent shifts in the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (ai), focusing on the emergence and controversies surrounding Large Language Models (llm s). Tracing the historical trajectory of ai enthusiasm from the 1960s to the present, the paper delves into the paradigm shifts influenced by symbolic ai, parallel distributed processing, and the rise of llm s, with particular emphasis on the transformative impact of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 release in late 2022. The paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on ai (...) ethics, societal implications, and the intricate debate surrounding the perceived intelligence and consciousness of contemporary language models. (shrink)

The present article discusses scientific research in relation to the norms of representative democracy, arguing that politicians are committed to base their policy on scientific evidence. It is argued that people have both natural interests and social interests and that our natural interests, which we have acquired through natural selection and adaptation, are best taken care of by a representative democracy in which science proliferates. The article also argues why politicians and the public should trust science as the best means (...) to fulfil our natural interests. (shrink)

I present Georges Bataille’s general economy and trace to what extent it draws on Vladimir Vernadsky’s work The Biosphere and Friedrich Nietzsche’s power ‘ontology.’ I also situate Bataille’s thoughts within contemporary planetary thinking, such as Gaia theory, and highlight some of the potential in thinking global ecology in the light of a Dionysian understanding of the biosphere.

What is the role of researchers in society? Can research be political? A heated debate in Denmark about activist research and pseudoscience raised many philosophical issues about the role of the scientist in society. In this article, we distinguish between different strands of this debate about activist research and the limits of academic freedom from the perspective of ethics and the philosophy of science. We begin by presenting some topics from the debate. Then we discuss perspectives from the ethics of (...) science in relation to science and society, cancel culture, pseudoscience, demarcation, and academic freedom. Moreover, we analyze the ethical obligation of researchers to be public intellectuals as essential for ensuring the ethics and responsibility of science in democratic societies. Accordingly, we present the idea of the public intellectual proposed by Hannah Arendt as a justification for the protection of academic freedom and for the ethical responsibility of science in society. (shrink)