Samuel Schindler
University of Konstanz, Germany
Fall Term 2010
Towards a New Epistemology of Science

Samuel Schindler is a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and the Zukunftskolleg (an institute for advanced studies) at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Before coming to Konstanz, he was a research fellow at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, and employed as temporary lecturer at the University of Birmingham (UK). Samuel holds a BSc in Cognitive Science, an MA in History and Philosophy of Science, and a PhD in Philosophy of Science (University of Leeds, UK).

Samuel’s research seeks to make fruitful the history of science to philosophical views about science. Central to Samuel’s long term project Towards a New Epistemology of Science is the idea of theory-driven data reliability judgments, which may be viewed as a form of theory-ladenness. However, whereas the classical form of theory-ladenness is a concept that threatens to undermine the “epistemic purity” of observations, the idea of theory-driven data reliability judgments does so with the epistemic foundation that philosophers (and in particular the New Experimentalists) were hoping to find in the experimental practices of science. Additionally, and in contrast to the concept of theory-ladenness, the concept of theory-driven data reliability judgments emphasises the properties of theories (in particular their non-empirical virtues) that fuel those judgments. If the idea of theory-driven data reliability judgements can be supported (which Samuel will seek to do with various historical case studies), this may pose new challenges to standard notions of not only data reliability, but also of theory-confirmation, theory-choice, and the aim of science.

In his free time Samuel tries to compensate for the constant sitting during work through various physical activities. He loves exploring the diverse cultural offerings one finds only in cities such as Pittsburgh.

2012
I was appointed Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Center for Science Studies at the Aarhus University (Denmark) in October last year.

2014

‘Explanatory fictions—for real?’, Synthese, forthcoming
‘A matter of Kuhnian theory-choice? The GSW model and the neutral current’, Perspectives on Science, forthcoming.
 ‘Novelty, Coherence, and Mendeleev’s periodic table’, Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, Vol. 45, March 2014, p. 62-69.
‘The Kuhnian mode of HPS’, Synthese, December 2013, Vol. 190 (18), pp 4137-4154
 ‘Mechanistic explanation: asymmetry lost’, V. Karakostas and D. Dieks (eds.) (2013), Recent
Progress in Philosophy of Science: Perspectives and Foundational Problems, The Third European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings, Dordrecht: Springer.
‘Theory-laden experimentation’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 44, issue 1,
March 2013, pp. 89–101.
  ‘Observation and theory-ladenness’, in B. Kaldis (ed.), (2013), Encyclopaedia for Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Los Angeles: SAGE publishing.
 ‘History and Philosophy of Science: coherent programme at last?’ Review of Seymour Mauskopf and Tad Schmaltz (eds.): Integrating history and philosophy of science: Problems and prospects. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 263”, Metascience, July 2013, Vol. 22(2), pp 457-60.

2015

My biggest achievement this year was the successful application for a Sapere Aude Starting Grant from the Danish Council of Independent Research, worth ca. 900K EUR. It will allow me to lead a research group consisting of two postdocs and a PhD student. The project is on Intuitions in Science and Philosophy.

At the PSA 2014 I organised a symposium on ‘The Scientific Method revisited’, which included N. Cartwright, E. Sober, C. Glymour, and I. Votsis. I also gave papers at a conference on realism in Cape Town and the &HPS5 in Vienna.

Four papers of mine were published. You can find them here. My latest paper (on scientific discovery) has just appeared in the new free access journal Ergo. You can download it here.