Group Members
Group leader
Tuukka Kaidesoja
Dr. Tuukka Kaidesoja is a University Lecturer in sociology at the University of Eastern Finland and a member of the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science (TINT) at the University of Helsinki. Kaidesoja also holds a Title of Docent in sociology at the University of Turku and is a member of the Editorial Boards of Innovation in the Social Sciences and Frontiers in Sociology. He has previously worked as a University Researcher at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and as a University Researcher and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences in Helsinki. In 2015-2016, Kaidesoja worked as a University Lecturer in sociology at the University of Turku (a fixed-term contract for two years). Kaidesoja is the author of Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology (Routledge) and a co-editor of two volumes in Finnish, Ihmismielen sosiaalisuus (Sociality of Human Mind) and Syistä selityksiin: Kausaalisuus ja selittäminen yhteiskuntatieteissä (From Causes to Explanations: Causation and Explanation in the Social Sciences), both published by Gaudeamus (University of Helsinki Press). His work has been published in many international journals, including The British Journal of Sociology, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Higher Education Policy, Social Science Information, and Synthese. Kaidesoja’s research interests range from sociological theory and science policy to methodological and philosophical issues concerning the social sciences and the relations between the social and cognitive sciences.
More information:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9633-2944
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/tuukka-kaidesoja
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sSy6c8EAAAAJ&hl=fi&oi=ao
Postdoctoral researchers
Matti Sarkia
Dr. Matti Sarkia is a postdoctoral researcher and member of the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science (TINT) at the University of Helsinki. Sarkia defended his dissertation, ”A Model-Based and Mechanistic Approach to Social Coordination”, in June 2022. After completing his first degree in sociology, he has been located in the philosophy discipline, working on topics related to social ontology, philosophy of the social sciences, and philosophical methodology. In recent work, he has applied ideas related to mechanistic explanation in the philosophy of science to questions of interdisciplinarity at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences, and explored affinities between the practices of conceptual analysis and scientific modeling. In addition to his academic home at the University of Helsinki, he has been a visitor at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, the University of Munich, and Melbourne University.
More information:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6523-9993
https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/people/people-finder/matti-sarkia-9086244
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ft71iyYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Doctoral researchers
Ronny Puustinen
Ronny Puustinen is a doctoral researcher in cognitive science at the Department of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä. Puustinen is currently working on the themes of behavioral computational social sciences, agent-based modelling (ABM) and cognition in multi-agent interaction. Puustinen has a background in philosophy and social sciences and has investigated ethically aligned design practices in AI development, human-technology interaction and moral cognition. Puustinen is also a teacher in social studies and philosophy.
More information:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ronny-Puustinen
https://jyu.academia.edu/RonnyPuustinen
https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Person/8804810
Mikko Hyyryläinen
Mikko Hyyryläinen is a doctoral researcher in science studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. A sociologist by trade he is currently working on his dissertation in which he analyzes two cases of cognitive social sciences, interdisciplinary cognitive sociology and neurosociology, with the theoretical framework of sociology of scientific knowledge. His current topics of interest are sociology of scientific knowledge, scientific/intellectual movements, cognitive sociology and computational social sciences.
More information
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2403-6502
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/mikko-esa-juhani-hyyryl%C3%A4inen