Studieordning for Filosofi og Videnskabsteori - ACE Denmark

Pelle Guldborg Hansen
Ph.D.Student
How can behavioral norms be rational, discriminating, and morally celebrated at the
same time? How do people come to believe in their own repression? What makes a
ceasefire work, and how may it be established in the first place? Why don’t people
stop for red in Naples, and how do you get children to divide a cake peacefully?
These and similar questions concerning the deep structures of societies make up a
crucial part of my research field.
I was born 1977, and graduated from RUC (Section for Philosophy and Sciencestudies /
Institute for Social Sciences) as cand. mag. in 2005 with the combined M.A. thesis
Exploring the Nature and Dynamics of Social Conventions. In this I explore within an
evolutionary game theoretic framework how and why social conventions emerge,
stabilize and sometimes even change or deteriorate. In particular I show how the
dynamics of conventions of coordination, discrimination and cooperation may be
understood in relation to features of social contexts. Also, I point to certain interesting
perspectives that a theory of convention may cast upon normative attitudes, morality
and doxa.
In my PhD‐project, financed by the science studies programme and supervised by
Vincent F. Hendricks, I pursue certain of these perspectives further. In particular I
work on the possibilities for incorporating the nature and dynamics of social norms
within the aforementioned ramework, as well as developing this further for
applicational purposes. Illuminating examples from the latter branch of research turn
on such issues as how to lower assaults on parking attendants, how to activate
normative attitudes and behaviour so as to avoid littering, and how to engineer
passenger behaviour in trains and metros so as to optimize entrance and leaving.
Research in progress and published articles are continually updated at my homepage
www.akira.ruc.dk/~pgh and I am always excited to discuss this with students and
colleagues.
Areas of interest include all methodological, philosophical and applied aspects of
classical and evolutionary game theory; social philosophy and issues of collective
action; social engineering and social software; social norms and social conventions;
doxa, endoxa and moderate social constructivism; memetics.
Besides this, I am also co‐editing Phinews with Vincent F. Hendricks and Prof. Stig
Andur Pedersen and co‐editing ShippingNEWS with Prof. Stig Andur Pedersen; I have
arranged around 15 international scientific conferences and teach a Master course on
scientific method and statistics a IT‐U, Copenhagen; finally I am very fond of coffee,
soccer, traffic lights and bi‐directional pedestrian flows.
tlf.: 4674 2661
e‐mail: pgh@ruc.dk
homepage: www.akira.ruc.dk/~pgh