Lance Jeffrey Rips (born December 19, 1947) is an American psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Chart ...
. Before joining Northwestern in 1994, he taught at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
for nineteen years. His research has focused on
human memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
and
deductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning is the mental process of drawing deductive inferences. An inference is deductively valid if its conclusion follows logically from its premises, i.e. if it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false ...
, among other topics. He received a
Fulbright Fellowship
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...
in 2004 and 2005, and he was a
Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in 2008. In addition, he is a fellow of the
Cognitive Science Society
The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society pro ...
,
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has ...
, the
Association for Psychological Science
The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in ...
, and the
Society of Experimental Psychologists
The Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP), originally called the Society of Experimentalists, is an academic society for experimental psychologists. It was founded by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1904 to be an ongoing workshop in which mem ...
.
Research
Rips's research has ranged from studies of human concepts to reasoning and to autobiographical memory and survey methods. Along with Edward Smith, Edward Shoben, and Eleanor Rosch, he helped establish the role of prototypes in people's knowledge of natural categories. His experiments on prototypes in inductive reasoning started a stream of research on category-based inductive reasoning. Later work focused on deductive reasoning, developing a computational theory along the lines of
natural deduction In logic and proof theory, natural deduction is a kind of proof calculus in which logical reasoning is expressed by inference rules closely related to the "natural" way of reasoning. This contrasts with Hilbert-style systems, which instead use a ...
in logic. More recent work includes studies of number systems, concepts of individual objects, and explanation.
Selected works
Articles
* Rips, L. J. (2020). Possible objects: Topological approaches to individuation. Cognitive Science, 44(11).
* Rips, L. J., & Hespos, S. J. (2015). Divisions of the physical world: Concepts of objects and substances. Psychological Bulletin, 141, 786-811.
* Rips, L. J., & Thompson, S. (2014). Possible number systems. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 3-23.
* Rips, L. J., Bloomfield, A., & Asmuth, J. (2008). From numerical concepts to concepts of number. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 623-642.
* Rips, L. J., Blok, S., & Newman, G. (2006). Tracing the identity of objects. Psychological Review, 113, 1-30.
* Rips, L. J. (2000). The cognitive nature of instantiation. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 20-43.
Authored books
* Rips, L. J. (2011). Lines of thought: Central concepts in cognitive psychology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
* Tourangeau, R., Rips, L. J., & Rasinski, K. (2000). The psychology of survey response. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
* Rips, L. J. (1994). The psychology of proof: Deduction in human thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
References
External links
Faculty page*
1948 births
Living people
Northwestern University faculty
University of Chicago faculty
Swarthmore College alumni
Stanford University alumni
Fellows of the American Psychological Association
Fellows of the Association for Psychological Science
Fellows of the Society of Experimental Psychologists
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