Awards
- National Academies - 1983
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
Ronald Nelson Giere was born November 29, 1938 and is an American philosopher of science. An elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is a long-time member of the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, and a past president of the Philosophy of Science Association. He earned his B.A. in physics from Oberlin College in 1960, M.S. in physics in 1963 and Ph.D. in philosophy in 1968 both from Cornell University.
From 1968-1987 he served in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at IU Bloomington before becoming professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. His research focuses on agent-based accounts of models and scientific representation, and on connections between naturalism and secularism. In his book Scientific Perspectivism, he developed a version of perspectival realism in which he argues that scientific descriptions capture only selected aspects of reality, and those aspects are not bits of the world seen as they are in themselves, but bits of the world seen from a distinctive human perspective. He is the author of: Understanding Scientific Reasoning (5th ed 2006); Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach (1988); Science Without Laws (1999); and Scientific Perspectivism (2006). He also edited several volumes of papers in the philosophy of science, including, Cognitive Models of Science (1992) and Origins of Logical Empiricism (1996).
Giere passed away in 2020 at the age of 82.