Philip Johnson-Laird

Biography

He was educated at Culford School and University College London where he won the Rosa Morison Medal in 1964 and a James Sully Scholarship between 1964 and 1966. He achieved a BA there in 1964 and a PhD in 1967. He was elected to a Fellowship in 1994.

His entry in Who's Who (2007 edition) records the following career history:

• Ten years of miscellaneous jobs, as surveyor, musician, hospital porter (alternative to National Service), librarian, before going to university.
• Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer, in Psychology, UCL, 1966–73
• Visiting Member, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, 1971–72
• Reader, 1973, Professor, 1978, in Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex
• Visiting Fellow, Stanford University, 1980
• Assistant Director, MRC Applied Psychology Unit, University of Cambridge, 1983–89
• Fellow, Darwin College, Cambridge, 1984–89
• Visiting Professorships: Stanford University, 1985; Princeton Univ., 1986.

He joined the department of psychology at Princeton University in 1989, where he became the Stuart Professor of Psychology in 1994. He retired in 2012.

Johnson-Laird is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, a William James Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from: Göteborg, 1983; Padua, 1997; Madrid, 2000; Dublin, 2000; Ghent, 2002; Palermo, 2005. He won the Spearman Medal in 1974, the British Psychological Society President's Award in 1985, and the International Prize from Fyssen Foundation in 2002.

Along with several other scholars, Johnson-Laird delivered the 2001 Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow, published as The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding (ed. Anthony Sanford, T & T Clark, 2003). He has been a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences since 2007.