'Patrick Colonel Suppes' (b. 1922, Tulsa, OK) is an
American philosopher who has made significant contributions to
philosophy of science, theory of
measurement, foundations of
quantum mechanics,
decision theory,
psychology, and
educational technology. Suppes initially graduated in meteorology from the University of Chicago, and was stationed at the Solomon Islands during WWII. After the war, he received a
PhD degree from
Columbia University, where he was a student of
Ernest Nagel. In 1952 he went to
Stanford University, and from 1959 to 1992 he was the director of the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences (IMSSS). He is now the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Stanford.
In the 1960s, Suppes and
Richard C. Atkinson (the future president of the
University of California) conducted experiments in using computers to teach math and reading to schoolchildren in the
Palo Alto area. Stanford's
Education Program for Gifted Youth and Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC, now named Pearson Education Technologies) is an indirect descendant of those early experiments.
In 1965 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences for his work on mathematical psychology. In 1990, Suppes was awarded the prestigious
National Medal of Science by President George H. W. Bush. In 1994 he was inducted as a
Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery. He is the laureate of the 2003
Lakatos Award for his contributions to the philosophy of science.
See also
★
Richard C. Atkinson
★
Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)
★
Frederick Suppe
Books by Suppes
★ 1972 (1960). ''Axiomatic Set Theory''. Dover. Spanish translation by H. A. Castillo, ''Teoria Axiomatica de Conjuntos''.
★ 1984. ''Probabilistic Metaphysics'', Blackwell Pub; Reprint edition (October 1986)
★ 1994. ''Patrick Suppes: Scientific Philosopher'', P. Humphreys, ed. Synthese Library (Springer-Verlag).
★
★ Vol. 1: ''Probability and Probabilistic Causality''.
★
★ Vol. 2: ''Philosophy of Physics, Theory Structure and Measurement, and Action Theory''.
★ 1999 (1957). ''Introduction to Logic''. Dover. Spanish translation by G. A. Carrasco, ''Introduccion a la logica simbolica''. Chinese translation by Fu-Tseng Liu.
★ 2001. ''Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures''. CSLI (distributed by the University of Chicago Press).
★ 2002 (1964) (with Shirley Hill). ''A First Course in Mathematical Logic''. Dover. Spanish translation.
★ 2007 (1972) (with
R. Duncan Luce, David Krantz, and
Amos Tversky). ''Foundations of Measurement'', Vols. 1-3. Dover.
External links
★
Patrick Suppes autobiography and complete bibliography.
★
National Medal of Science page.
★
Patrick Suppes' papers, in pdf.