American Philosophical Society
Member History

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1Name:  Dr. Gordon H. Bower
 Institution:  Stanford University
 Year Elected:  2004
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1932
 Death Date:  June 17, 2020
   
 
After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1959, Gordon H. Bower was associated with Stanford University as an assistant, associate and full professor of psychology, chair of the psychology department and associate dean of humanities and science. He had been Albert Ray Long Professor of Psychology since 1975. Dr. Bower's career centered on memory, its nature and manipulation. He began with animal learning but soon moved to mathematical modeling and human experiments, where he successfully championed all-or-none learning models. Next came studies of the key role of linguistic chunking in creating and storing memories, which led into a series of foci including the nature of associative memory, the role of memory structures both in facilitating and distorting memory, the impact of emotional states on memories, and most recently on the narrative organization of memory. His contributions have been most significant and influential, in part through many first-rate students. Dr. Bower was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1975. He recently received the nation's highest honor in science: the 2005 National Medal of Science.
 
2Name:  Dr. Noam Chomsky
 Institution:  University of Arizona
 Year Elected:  2004
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1928
   
 
Noam Chomsky is currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics, Agnese Nelms Haury Chair at the University of Arizona, having moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall of 2017. He has created a theory of generative grammar that unites formal analysis of natural language with the search for explanatory models in linguistics, and has adapted that theory to the description of individual languages. Dr. Chomsky holds that grammar represents the speaker's tacit knowledge of the language and so must be part of the mind/brain structure. He has argued that children learning a first language do not receive sufficient information to account for the knowledge they come to have; hence some knowledge of language must be genetically determined as part of a species-universal faculty of mind he calls Universal Grammar. For over 50 years Dr. Chomsky served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he has held the title of Institute Professor since 1976. When he left, he held the title of Institute Professor Emeritus and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus and had just won the 2016 Peace Abbey Foundation Courage of Conscience Award. He is the author of numerous works, including Syntactic Structures (1957); Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964); Language and Mind (1968); Linguistic Theory (1975); Knowledge of Language (1986); The Minimalist Program (1995); and On Nature and Language (2002). Dr. Chomsky is also well known for his political activism, from his 1967 essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" to more recent explorations of media control, terrorism, anarchism and democracy. His 2003 book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance received considerable attention following a recommendation from Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez during his 2006 speech at the United Nations. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Dr. Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar, and the eighth most cited scholar overall. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
 
3Name:  Dr. Daniel Kahneman
 Institution:  School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University
 Year Elected:  2004
 Class:  3. Social Sciences
 Subdivision:  305
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1934
   
 
Daniel Kahneman's initial research on perception and attention shifted to decision making, his Nobel prize work, with A. Tversky. It has continued with others since Tversky's death. Ingenious experiments and novel concepts have focused on how the decision outcome is sharply affected by their framing and by the roles of heuristics, such as availability, and biases. They have cast severe doubt on the standard rationality assumption of economics. Prospect theory, a continuing well-spring for research, captured some of the discoveries theoretically. Important applications are to economic theory, finance, law, and medicine. Born in Israel in 1934, Dr. Kahneman holds a Ph.D. from the University of California (1961). He has taught at the Hebrew University (1961-78), the University of British Columbia (1978-86), the University of California, Berkeley (1986-94) and Princeton University, where he has been Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School since 1993. In 2007 he received the American Psychological Association's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology and in 2011 he was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Talcott Parsons Prize. His most recent book is Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). He was awarded the 2013 Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
 
Election Year
2004[X]