Patrick Suppes Prize for Nancy Nersessian

Nancy Nersessian has been awarded the inaugural Patrick Suppes Prize for Philosophy of Science. This award to Nancy Nersessian is a nice recognition of what can be done with interdisciplinary approaches taking into account both cognition and culture. Indeed, her work consists in describing “the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that lead up to scientific innovation, both theoretical and experimental.”

In her book, Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian provides detailed analyses of model based reasoning, which she shows to be at the heart of conceptual change. He work includes both very detailed analyses of individual scientists’ cognitive processes and a specification of the role of the social, cultural and material environments. For instance, she has been illustrating with case studies the theory of distributed cognition, and enriching it with new ideas and concepts. Her methodology includes mainly cognitive history and cognitive ethnography.