The London School of Economics and Political Science announces that the 2003 Lakatos Award, of £10,000 for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, goes to:

Suppes

 

Patrick Suppes (Stanford University), for his book Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures (CSLI Publications, 2002).

 

 

A fundamental reason for using formal methods in the philosophy of science is the desirability of having a fixed frame of reference that may be used to organize the variety of doctrines at hand. This book—Patrick Suppes’s major work, and the result of several decades of research—examines how set-theoretical methods provide such a framework, covering issues of axiomatic method, representation, invariance, probability, mechanics, and language, including research on brain-wave representations of words and sentences. This is a groundbreaking, essential text from a distinguished philosopher.

Lakatos Award Lecture

29 April 2004, 5.30pm

Old Theatre, London School of Economics

Why are the Concepts of Representation and Invariance Important in Science?