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. Charte ...

. 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 research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

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 fals ...

, 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 prom ...

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 ha ...

, 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 memb ...

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 axiom ...

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 {{US-psychologist-stub