Samuel K. Schindler

I’m associate professor of philosophy of science at the Centre for Science Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark.

My main research is in general philosophy of science, which is concerned with general questions about science rather than more discipline-specific questions. Very broadly speaking, I’m interested in the relationship between scientific theories and evidence, and more specifically in how strongly theories can guide the collection and interpretation of data; whether there are certain types of evidence that are more important than others (e.g., predicted vs accommodated evidence); how theories explain the evidence; how theories are chosen on the basis of evidence and other criteria; and how discoveries are made.

All my work combines philosophical with empirical methods. Much of my work contains detailed historical case studies and lately I have also conducted surveys and survey experiments.

I have an interest in meta-philosophy: I like to reflect on why the use of historical case studies for philosophical purposes might be justified. I have done work on the use of intuitive judgments as evidence in thought experiments. Here, I see parallels between philosophy, linguistics, and physics.

I have presented my work on numerous international conferences and published in leading peer-reviewed journals. Amongst my greatest achievements I count the publication of my book Theoretical Virtues in Science: Uncovering Reality Through Theory (CUP, 2018), and my project on Intuitions in Science and Philosophy, which ran from 2016-19, and which was generously funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

My PhD (in philosophy) is from the University of Leeds (2008). Prior to my appointment in Aarhus, I taught at the University of Birmingham (UK), and had research and visiting fellowships at the universities of Stockholm, Konstanz, and Pittsburgh (as fellow at Centre for Philosophy of Science). Most recently I was a visiting professor at the Department of Philosophy at the UBC in Vancouver.