Sven Ove Hansson

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Sven Ove Hansson (born 1951) is a Swedish philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy and History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. He is an author and scientific skeptic, with a special interest in environmental risk assessment, as well as in decision theory and belief revision. [1] [2]

Contents

Career

Hansson obtained a bachelor's degree in medical science in 1972, and then worked for a Swedish trade union, followed by a job with the Swedish Social Democrats. He received a PhD in theoretical philosophy at Uppsala University in 1991, following which he was from 1993 to 1999 forskarassistent (the Swedish equivalent of an associate professor) at Uppsala. He received a second PhD in practical philosophy at the University of Lund in 1999, and since 2000 he has been a professor at KTH; he became department head in 2005. [3]

The Swedish Government appointed Hansson to the Products Control Board (1976–1982; the predecessor of the National Chemicals Inspectorate), the National Board for Spent Nuclear Fuel (1981–1992) and the Natural Science Foundation (1989–1992). He continues to write on radiation exposure risk assessment. [4] He was also a member of two temporary Commissions on environmental policies appointed by the Swedish Government, expert advisor to a 1999–2000 Swedish government committee the kemikaliekommittén, and a member of the board of the MISTRA project New Strategy for the risk management of chemical substances. Hansson's contributions on theories of risk assessment have been cited as recently as 2012. [5]

Since December 2000, Hansson has been a member of forskningsberedningen, the Swedish government's advisory board of researchers.

Hansson has contributed to the development of belief revision theory, in particular, analysis of application of the AGM postulates. [1] [6] His work is also cited in discussions of ethics in institutional decision-making. [7] [8] Google Scholar lists 17,417 citations of his work and gives his h-index as 68 and i10-index as 271 . [9] As of 2022 he continues to publish on ethics, logic and public health in major journals. [9]

Since September 1999 he has been the Editor-in-Chief of Theoria , the only international, peer-reviewed, philosophy journal published in Sweden. He was the founding chairperson of the Swedish Skeptics (Vetenskap och Folkbildning), [10] and is still a board member and editor of the organisation's journal Folkvett.

Hansson has criticized anthroposophy as a pseudo-science. [11] [12] [13]

Publications

He has published numerous articles and books in Swedish and in English.

Books in English

Selected journal articles in English

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Epistemology</span> Branch of philosophy concerning knowledge

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pseudoscience</span> Unscientific claims wrongly presented as scientific

Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited.

Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reasons. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an ability, as in rational animal, to a psychological process, like reasoning, to mental states, such as beliefs and intentions, or to persons who possess these other forms of rationality. A thing that lacks rationality is either arational, if it is outside the domain of rational evaluation, or irrational, if it belongs to this domain but does not fulfill its standards.

Reflective equilibrium is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgements. Although he did not use the term, philosopher Nelson Goodman introduced the method of reflective equilibrium as an approach to justifying the principles of inductive logic. The term reflective equilibrium was coined by John Rawls and popularized in his A Theory of Justice as a method for arriving at the content of the principles of justice.

Philosophical skepticism is a family of philosophical views that question the possibility of knowledge. It differs from other forms of skepticism in that it even rejects very plausible knowledge claims that belong to basic common sense. Philosophical skeptics are often classified into two general categories: Those who deny all possibility of knowledge, and those who advocate for the suspension of judgment due to the inadequacy of evidence. This distinction is modeled after the differences between the Academic skeptics and the Pyrrhonian skeptics in ancient Greek philosophy. In the latter sense, skepticism is understood as a way of life that helps the practitioner achieve inner peace. Some types of philosophical skepticism reject all forms of knowledge while others limit this rejection to certain fields, for example, to knowledge about moral doctrines or about the external world. Some theorists criticize philosophical skepticism based on the claim that it is a self-refuting idea since its proponents seem to claim to know that there is no knowledge. Other objections focus on its implausibility and distance from regular life.

A non-monotonic logic is a formal logic whose conclusion relation is not monotonic. In other words, non-monotonic logics are devised to capture and represent defeasible inferences, i.e., a kind of inference in which reasoners draw tentative conclusions, enabling reasoners to retract their conclusion(s) based on further evidence. Most studied formal logics have a monotonic entailment relation, meaning that adding a formula to a theory never produces a pruning of its set of conclusions. Intuitively, monotonicity indicates that learning a new piece of knowledge cannot reduce the set of what is known. A monotonic logic cannot handle various reasoning tasks such as reasoning by default, abductive reasoning, some important approaches to reasoning about knowledge, and similarly, belief revision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Bostrom</span> Swedish philosopher and writer

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, whole brain emulation, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test. In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, and is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. In 2009 and 2015, he was included in Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list.

In philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation problem is the question of how to distinguish between science and non-science. It examines the boundaries between science, pseudoscience and other products of human activity, like art and literature and beliefs. The debate continues after over two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields. The debate has consequences for what can be called "scientific" in fields such as education and public policy.

Belief revision is the process of changing beliefs to take into account a new piece of information. The logical formalization of belief revision is researched in philosophy, in databases, and in artificial intelligence for the design of rational agents.

Anthroposophic medicine is a form of alternative medicine based on pseudoscientific and occult notions. Devised in the 1920s by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) in conjunction with Ita Wegman (1876–1943), anthroposophical medicine draws on Steiner's spiritual philosophy, which he called anthroposophy. Practitioners employ a variety of treatment techniques based upon anthroposophic precepts, including massage, exercise, counselling, and substances.

Formal epistemology uses formal methods from decision theory, logic, probability theory and computability theory to model and reason about issues of epistemological interest. Work in this area spans several academic fields, including philosophy, computer science, economics, and statistics. The focus of formal epistemology has tended to differ somewhat from that of traditional epistemology, with topics like uncertainty, induction, and belief revision garnering more attention than the analysis of knowledge, skepticism, and issues with justification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning</span> Organization based in Sweden

Vetenskap och Folkbildning, abbreviated as VoF, is a Swedish skeptics' association. It was founded in 1982 with the purpose to raise the general public's awareness of scientific methods and results. The association publishes the quarterly journal Folkvett and organises lectures on themes related to science and pseudoscience. Since 1987 the association has annually awarded prizes for "Enlightener of the Year" and "Misleader of the Year".

James Franklin is an Australian philosopher, mathematician and historian of ideas.

Synthese is a scholarly periodical specializing in papers in epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of science, and related issues. Its subject area is divided into four specialties, with a focus on the first three: (1) "epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of science, all broadly understood"; (2) "foundations of logic and mathematics, where 'logic', 'mathematics', and 'foundations' are all broadly understood"; (3) "formal methods in philosophy, including methods connecting philosophy to other academic fields"; and (4) "issues in ethics and the history and sociology of logic, mathematics, and science that contribute to the contemporary studies".

<i>Theoria</i> (philosophy journal) Academic journal

Theoria: A Swedish Journal of Philosophy and Psychology is a peer-reviewed academic journal publishing research in all areas of philosophy established in 1935 by Åke Petzäll. It is published quarterly by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of Stiftelsen Theoria. The current editor-in-chief is Sven Ove Hansson. Theoria publishes articles, reviews, and shorter notes and discussions.

Scott F. Aikin is an American philosopher and assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he also holds a joint appointment in Classics. He earned an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Montana in 1999 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2006. His principal areas of research are epistemology, argumentation theory, ancient philosophy, and pragmatism.

André Fuhrmann is a Professor of Philosophy and Logic at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Argument technology is a sub-field of artificial intelligence that focuses on applying computational techniques to the creation, identification, analysis, navigation, evaluation and visualisation of arguments and debates. In the 1980s and 1990s, philosophical theories of arguments in general, and argumentation theory in particular, were leveraged to handle key computational challenges, such as modeling non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and designing robust coordination protocols for multi-agent systems. At the same time, mechanisms for computing semantics of Argumentation frameworks were introduced as a way of providing a calculus of opposition for computing what it is reasonable to believe in the context of conflicting arguments.

Dutch philosophy is a broad branch of philosophy that discusses the contributions of Dutch philosophers to the discourse of Western philosophy and Renaissance philosophy. The philosophy, as its own entity, arose in the 16th and 17th centuries through the philosophical studies of Desiderius Erasmus and Baruch Spinoza. The adoption of the humanistic perspective by Erasmus, despite his Christian background, and rational but theocentric perspective expounded by Spinoza, supported each of these philosopher's works. In general, the philosophy revolved around acknowledging the reality of human self-determination and rational thought rather than focusing on traditional ideals of fatalism and virtue raised in Christianity. The roots of philosophical frameworks like the mind-body dualism and monism debate can also be traced to Dutch philosophy, which is attributed to 17th century philosopher René Descartes. Descartes was both a mathematician and philosopher during the Dutch Golden Age, despite being from the Kingdom of France. Modern Dutch philosophers like D.H. Th. Vollenhoven provided critical analyses on the dichotomy between dualism and monism.

Eduardo Fermé is an Argentinian computer scientist and philosopher known for his work in belief revision and non monotonic reasoning. He is Full Professor at the University of Madeira.

References

  1. 1 2 Gärdenfors, Peter (2011). "Notes on the history of ideas behind AGM". Journal of Philosophical Logic . 40 (2): 115–120. doi:10.1007/s10992-011-9174-6. S2CID   27170256.
  2. Yamin, Tughral (2012). "An appreciation of the Pakistani Military thought process" . Strategic Studies. 32 (2–3). Retrieved 2014-05-09 via ProQuest.
  3. "CV for Sven Ove Hansson". home.abe.kth.se. Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). Archived from the original on 2013-09-17.
  4. Hansson, Sven Ove (2011). "Radiation protection—Sorting out the arguments". Philosophy & Technology. 24 (3): 363–368. doi:10.1007/s13347-011-0036-5. S2CID   144907833.
  5. Rossi, John (2012). "The prospects for objectivity in risk assessment". Journal of Value Inquiry . 46 (2): 237–253. doi:10.1007/s10790-012-9338-9. S2CID   144300032.
  6. Rott, Hans; Pagnucco, Maurice (1999). "Severe withdrawal (and recovery)". Journal of Philosophical Logic . 28 (5): 501–547. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.43.1190 . doi:10.1023/A:1004344003217. S2CID   15272664.
  7. Fischer, Robert (30 December 2008). "European governance still technocratic? New modes of governance for food safety regulation in the European Union" . European Integration Online Papers. 12: 1–26. Retrieved 2014-05-09 via ProQuest.
  8. Arcuri, Alessandra (2007). "Reconstructing precaution, deconstructing misconceptions". Ethics & International Affairs . 21 (3): 275, 359–379. doi:10.1111/j.1747-7093.2007.00104.x.
  9. 1 2 "Sven Ove Hansson". Google Scholar . Retrieved 2022-08-24.
  10. Jerkert, Jesper; Hansson, Sven Ove (July–August 2006). "A Swedish professorship in parapsychology" . Skeptical Inquirer . Vol. 30, no. 4. p. 8. Retrieved 2014-05-09 via ProQuest.
  11. Hansson, Sven Ove (1991). "Is anthroposophy science?". Conceptus XXV. No. 64. pp. 37–49. Archived from the original on 2002-04-20 via waldorfcritics.org.
  12. Hansson, Sven Ove (1 June 2005). "The racial teachings of Rudolf Steiner". Skeptic Report. According to the original publication of the article in Swedish (Folkvett nr 3/2004.), it was written in response to criticism of the Swedish branch of the CSICOP for its publication the previous year of a critical anthology on anthroposophy as being repeatedly unreliable.
  13. Dugan, Dan; Daar, Judy (1994). "Are Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf schools 'non-sectarian?'". Free Inquiry .[ dead link ]