Patrick Suppes Prize

In 2005 Patrick Suppes, a Member of the APS since 1991, established and funded a set of prizes to honor accomplishments in three very different and deeply significant scholarly fields that reflect the spectacular scope of his own interests. The Patrick Suppes Prize will be awarded annually, with a cycle of three years rotating each of the three subject matter areas—a prize in Philosophy with special consideration for the Philosophy of Science, a prize in Psychology, and a prize in the History of Science.

Philosophy Recipients

2022
Craig Callender in recognition of his book, What Makes Time Special?
Sabina Leonelli in recognition of her book, Data-Centric Biology

2019
Peter Godfrey-Smith in recognition of his book Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life.

2014
William L. Harper in recognition of his book Isaac Newton's Scientific Method: Turning Data into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology published in 2012 by Oxford University Press.

2011
Nancy J. Nersessian in recognition of her book Creating Scientific Concepts.

History of Science Recipients

2024
Naomi Oreskes, in recognition of her book Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (University of Chicago Press 2021). The prize will be presented at the Society's November 2024 Meeting.

2021
Jessica Riskin in recognition of her book The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick in which she argues that although the dominant understanding of mechanism is passive (even a clock must be wound up in order to tick), there is also a competing view of mechanism as active, enspirited, having its source of motion within it.

2018
Angela Creager for her book Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine, an original and masterful contribution to the growing scholarship on how sciences are shaped by the development and deployment of new instruments.

2013
Willem "Pim" J. M. Levelt for A History of Psycholinguistics, The Pre-Chomskian Era, the most important and serious book yet written on the history of psycholinguistics prior to 1965.

Psychology Recipients

2023
Elke Weber in recognition of her research showing how people make decisions important for society, using creative experiments and mathematically precise models and theory.

2020
Elizabeth Loftus in recognition of her demonstrations that memories are generally altered, false memories can be implanted, and the changes in law and therapy this knowledge has caused.

2017
Olaf Sporns in recognition of his transformation of the understanding of the relation of brain to behavior.

2012
R. Duncan Luce in recognition of his distinguished and prolific research and publications in decision-making and utility theory that have continued unabated from the 1950s to the present.