Patrick Suppes

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. He is the laureate of the 2003 Lakatos Award for his contributions to the philosophy of science.

Books by Suppes

 * 1972 (1960). Axiomatic Set Theory. Dover. Spanish translation by H. A. Castillo, Teoria Axiomatica de Conjuntos.
 * 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.