J.D. Trout
Encyclopedia
J.D. Trout is an American philosopher of science, cognitive scientist, lecturer and nonfiction author. His most recent book, The Empathy Gap, makes the case that a fair and humane democracy
in modern times must turn to psychological science
to forge policies that correct for people’s natural imperfections. Since 1992 he has worked as a professor of philosophy
at Loyola University Chicago
, where he holds appointments in the philosophy department and the Parmly Sensory Sciences Institute. His research centers on the nature of scientific progress
, and its influence on human understanding
and well-being
.
in the U.S. Navy. He attended public schools in the Cleveland and the greater Philadelphia area, where he learned to box, drove a Class 2 vehicle, and flirted with a career in opera
. He received his bachelor's degree
in philosophy and history at Bucknell University
in 1982 and his doctorate
in philosophy at Cornell University
in 1988. He now lives in Evanston, Illinois
, with his wife and two children.
Predoctoral Fellow and a Sage Graduate Fellow at Cornell University. In 1988-89, Trout was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College
, and a Choice Award winner for his 1998 book Measuring the Intentional World. He was a visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck in 1999. In 2005, he was a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago
and a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Business.
, after having begun a parallel career in spoken language processing in his twenties. His work on philosophical and psychological topics often combine linguistics
, biology
, economics
, history
and public policy
. Measuring the Intentional World: Realism, Naturalism, and Quantitative Methods in the Behavioral Sciences contends that perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology
, so often marginalized as unworthy of the name “science
,” are emerging as mature fields, and deserve the kind of intellectual weight accorded physics and chemistry. This elevated status was then recruited to support a new version of scientific realism
, called measured realism. In 2005 Trout, together with Michael Bishop, published Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. The book argues that the theory of knowledge, as practiced in the English-speaking world, has become a parochial and scholastic exercise, and should be replaced with ameliorative psychology – an area of psychology devoted to evaluating and improving decision-making. The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges from the Good Life to the Good Society, recruits scientific research on empathy
, free will
, and decision-making to explain how decent people can ignore indecent degrees of inequality and suffering, and constructs a concrete and realistic vision of policies that improve human well-being
.
1995. P. Moser and J.D. Trout. Eds. Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. Routledge, London and New York. ISBN 0-41510-864-0.
1998. J.D. Trout. Measuring the Intentional World: Realism, Naturalism, and Quantitative Methods in the Behavioral Sciences. Oxford, New York. Paperback 2003. ISBN 0-19516-659-0.
1998. P. Moser, D. Mulder, and J.D. Trout. The Theory of Knowledge: A Thematic Introduction. Oxford, New York. ISBN 0-19509-466-2.
2005. Michael A. Bishop and J.D. Trout. Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. New York: Oxford University Press; third printing in 2006. ISBN 0-19516-230-7.
2009. J.D. Trout. The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society. Viking/Penguin, New York, February 2009. ISBN 0-670-02044-7.
1992. Theory-Conjunction and Mercenary Reliance. Philosophy of Science, 59, 231-245.
1994. A Realistic Look Backward. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 25 (1), 37-64.
2001. Metaphysics, Method and the Mouth: Philosophical Lessons of Speech Perception. Philosophical Psychology, 14, (3), 261-291.
2001. The Biological Basis of Speech: What to Infer from Talking to the Animals. Psychological Review, 108, (3), 523-549.
2002. 50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should be Enough: Lessons for the Philosophy of Science. Philosophy of Science 68 (Proceedings): S197-S208 (with Michael Bishop).
2002. Scientific Explanation and the Sense of Understanding. Philosophy of Science 69(2), 212-233.
2003. Biological Specializations for Speech: What Can the Animals Tell Us? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(5, October), 155-159.
2005. Lexical Boosting of Noise-band Speech in Open- and Closed-set Formats. Speech Communication 47(4), 424-435.
2005. Paternalism and Cognitive Bias. Law and Philosophy 24(4, July), 393-434.
2005. The Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology. Noûs 39 (4), 696-714 (with Michael Bishop).
2007. A Restriction Maybe, but is it Paternalism? Cognitive Bias and Choosing Governmental Decision Aids. NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, 2(3), 455-469.
2007. The Psychology of Scientific Explanation, Philosophy Compass, 2/3, 564-591.
2007. The Psychology of Discounting: A Policy of Balancing Biases. Public Affairs Quarterly, 21(2), 201-220.
2008. Seduction Without Cause: Uncovering Explanatory Neurophilia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 281-282.
Loyola University Chicago Faculty Website http://www.luc.edu/philosophy/faculty_trout.shtml
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
in modern times must turn to psychological science
Psychological science
Psychological Science is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the Association for Psychological Science , published by SAGE Publications. It is one of the most influential journals in psychology.-Publishings:...
to forge policies that correct for people’s natural imperfections. Since 1992 he has worked as a professor of philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
at Loyola University Chicago
Loyola University Chicago
Loyola University Chicago is a private Jesuit research university located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded by the Society of Jesus in 1870 under the title St...
, where he holds appointments in the philosophy department and the Parmly Sensory Sciences Institute. His research centers on the nature of scientific progress
Scientific progress
Scientific progress is the idea that science increases its problem solving ability through the application of some scientific method.-Discontinuous Model of Scientific Progress:...
, and its influence on human understanding
Understanding
Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object....
and well-being
Happiness
Happiness is a mental state of well-being characterized by positive emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. A variety of biological, psychological, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources....
.
Biography
Trout was born in Cleveland to a mother of Sicilian and Irish heritage, a member of the WAVESWAVES
The WAVES were a World War II-era division of the U.S. Navy that consisted entirely of women. The name of this group is an acronym for "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service" ; the word "emergency" implied that the acceptance of women was due to the unusual circumstances of the war and...
in the U.S. Navy. He attended public schools in the Cleveland and the greater Philadelphia area, where he learned to box, drove a Class 2 vehicle, and flirted with a career in opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
. He received his bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in philosophy and history at Bucknell University
Bucknell University
Bucknell University is a private liberal arts university located alongside the West Branch Susquehanna River in the rolling countryside of Central Pennsylvania in the town of Lewisburg, 30 miles southeast of Williamsport and 60 miles north of Harrisburg. The university consists of the College of...
in 1982 and his doctorate
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in philosophy at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
in 1988. He now lives in Evanston, Illinois
Evanston, Illinois
Evanston is a suburban municipality in Cook County, Illinois 12 miles north of downtown Chicago, bordering Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, and Wilmette to the north, with an estimated population of 74,360 as of 2003. It is one of the North Shore communities that adjoin Lake Michigan...
, with his wife and two children.
Awards and honors
Trout was a National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
Predoctoral Fellow and a Sage Graduate Fellow at Cornell University. In 1988-89, Trout was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
, and a Choice Award winner for his 1998 book Measuring the Intentional World. He was a visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck in 1999. In 2005, he was a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
and a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Business.
Works
Trout authored a number of experimental and theoretical articles on speech perceptionSpeech perception
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology...
, after having begun a parallel career in spoken language processing in his twenties. His work on philosophical and psychological topics often combine linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
, economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
, history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
and public policy
Policy
A policy is typically described as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome. The term is not normally used to denote what is actually done, this is normally referred to as either procedure or protocol...
. Measuring the Intentional World: Realism, Naturalism, and Quantitative Methods in the Behavioral Sciences contends that perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, so often marginalized as unworthy of the name “science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
,” are emerging as mature fields, and deserve the kind of intellectual weight accorded physics and chemistry. This elevated status was then recruited to support a new version of scientific realism
Scientific realism
Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be...
, called measured realism. In 2005 Trout, together with Michael Bishop, published Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. The book argues that the theory of knowledge, as practiced in the English-speaking world, has become a parochial and scholastic exercise, and should be replaced with ameliorative psychology – an area of psychology devoted to evaluating and improving decision-making. The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges from the Good Life to the Good Society, recruits scientific research on empathy
Empathy
Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...
, free will
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
, and decision-making to explain how decent people can ignore indecent degrees of inequality and suffering, and constructs a concrete and realistic vision of policies that improve human well-being
Happiness
Happiness is a mental state of well-being characterized by positive emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. A variety of biological, psychological, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources....
.
Books
1991. R. Boyd, P. Gasper, and J.D. Trout. Eds. The Philosophy of Science. Bradford Books/The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN 0-26252-156-3.1995. P. Moser and J.D. Trout. Eds. Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. Routledge, London and New York. ISBN 0-41510-864-0.
1998. J.D. Trout. Measuring the Intentional World: Realism, Naturalism, and Quantitative Methods in the Behavioral Sciences. Oxford, New York. Paperback 2003. ISBN 0-19516-659-0.
1998. P. Moser, D. Mulder, and J.D. Trout. The Theory of Knowledge: A Thematic Introduction. Oxford, New York. ISBN 0-19509-466-2.
2005. Michael A. Bishop and J.D. Trout. Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. New York: Oxford University Press; third printing in 2006. ISBN 0-19516-230-7.
2009. J.D. Trout. The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society. Viking/Penguin, New York, February 2009. ISBN 0-670-02044-7.
Articles
1990. Auditory and Visual Influences on Phonemic Restoration. Language and Speech, 33, 121-135 (with William Poser as second author).1992. Theory-Conjunction and Mercenary Reliance. Philosophy of Science, 59, 231-245.
1994. A Realistic Look Backward. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 25 (1), 37-64.
2001. Metaphysics, Method and the Mouth: Philosophical Lessons of Speech Perception. Philosophical Psychology, 14, (3), 261-291.
2001. The Biological Basis of Speech: What to Infer from Talking to the Animals. Psychological Review, 108, (3), 523-549.
2002. 50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should be Enough: Lessons for the Philosophy of Science. Philosophy of Science 68 (Proceedings): S197-S208 (with Michael Bishop).
2002. Scientific Explanation and the Sense of Understanding. Philosophy of Science 69(2), 212-233.
2003. Biological Specializations for Speech: What Can the Animals Tell Us? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(5, October), 155-159.
2005. Lexical Boosting of Noise-band Speech in Open- and Closed-set Formats. Speech Communication 47(4), 424-435.
2005. Paternalism and Cognitive Bias. Law and Philosophy 24(4, July), 393-434.
2005. The Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology. Noûs 39 (4), 696-714 (with Michael Bishop).
2007. A Restriction Maybe, but is it Paternalism? Cognitive Bias and Choosing Governmental Decision Aids. NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, 2(3), 455-469.
2007. The Psychology of Scientific Explanation, Philosophy Compass, 2/3, 564-591.
2007. The Psychology of Discounting: A Policy of Balancing Biases. Public Affairs Quarterly, 21(2), 201-220.
2008. Seduction Without Cause: Uncovering Explanatory Neurophilia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 281-282.
External links
J. D. Trout's Website http://www.jdtrout.comLoyola University Chicago Faculty Website http://www.luc.edu/philosophy/faculty_trout.shtml