Society for Philosophy
and Psychology

Prizes

Each year the SPP awards three prizes at its annual meeting. Congratulations to the 2009 winners.

The Stanton Award, for a young scholar in philosophy or psychology who has begun making significant contributions to interdisciplinary research and has been active in SPP, went to Joshua Knobe (Yale University).

The William James Prize, for the best contributed paper by a graduate student was awarded to Justin Sytsma and Jonathan Linvengood (University of Pittsburgh). And the prize for best poster went to Robert Lurz (Brooklyn College, CUNY).

The Stanton award is endowed in honor Harry and Betty Stanton of Bradford Books/The MIT Press. The executive committee selects the winner of the Stanton Prize. SPP members are invited to send nominations for the 2008 prize to the Stanton Prize coordinator.

William James and Poster Prize winners are chosen by an ad hoc committee appointed by the president in consultation with the executive committee. The process for selecting Stanton Prize winners is described below.

Stanton Prize Procedures

A 'prize coordinator' will be appointed by the executive committee, who may or may not be a member of the executive committee, and who will have primary responsibility for implementing the following procedures:

1) The prize coordinator will send out a call for nominations to the entire SPP membership by email, and further calls as they judge appropriate. The call for nominations will provide information about the prize and procedures for nomination, and will specify a closing date, which should be at least two weeks from the time of the first call for nominations. If, either at the time of closing or during the week prior to closing, it is felt that insufficient nominations have been received or that the nominations received to date are not of adequate quality, then the coordinator should seek the approval of the executive committee to send out a revised call with a later closing date. The revised closing date should be no later than one week after the sending out of the revised call.

2) A nominations will consist of the following, to be sent by email to stantonprize@gmail.com no later than midnight EST on the closing date:  (a) A brief statement of no more than 300 words describing: (i) the contributions of the candidate to interdisciplinary research in psychology and philosophy, or related disciplines (ii) the career stage of the candidate, and (iii) the candidates past participation in the SPP. This statement may be supplied by a nominator or by the candidate themselves.  (b) The candidate should provide a full and current CV attached as a separate file (.doc or .pdf).  (c) A single sentence sent by email from an SPP member in good standing stating that they nominate the candidate and giving their full name. (d) A separate email from the candidate which must (i) state that they wish to be considered a candidate for the prize, (ii) endorse the accuracy of the nominating statement, and (iii) provide a clear and unqualified commitment to attend that year's meeting and give a talk if they are awarded the prize.

3) If a nomination is received that is incomplete or does not otherwise meet the guidelines specified in (2), then the prize coordinator may, at their discretion, either reject the nomination outright, or they may inform the nominator and the candidate of the situation and invite them to correct the problem by a given deadline.

4) The prize coordinator will then send an email to the executive committee containing the names and statements of all properly nominated candidates, and offer to supply the full CVs of candidates on request, or supply a link to a website where they are posted. This should be done one week prior to the vote to allow time for discussion.

5) The 'executive committee', each of whom have a right to vote for the prize, is understood to consist of: the regular members of the executive committee, the past president, the current president, the president elect and the treasurer.

6) The prize coordinator will then send an email reminding the executive committee of the voting procedure and soliciting their votes. The committee members should be given at least two days to return their vote by email. The deadline for votes should be stated in the email, and may be extended by the voting coordinator at their discretion. The winner will be determined by a scoring system as follows: If the number of nominees is n then each member of the executive committee should produce an ordered list of candidates with a minimum length of one and a maximum length of (n-2). In other words, if there are just two or three nominees, then everyone would simply have a single vote. If there are four nominees then each member of the committee would list their preferred two candidates in order of preference. The first would receive 2 points, the second 1 point. If a member lists only one, then that person would receive 2 points. If there are five nominees, each committee member can provide an ordered list of up to three candidates, the first receiving 3 points, the second 2 points, the last 1 point. It should be clear how this would scale up.

7) In the event of a draw, a second vote will be held in which only the top drawing candidates will be considered, and in which each voting member will have a single vote. If this procedure yields a second draw, the president will have the right to select a winner from amongst the candidates who drew in the second election.

8) The prize coordinator will contact the nominated winner and have a conversation with them about their availability to attend the meeting to give a talk. The prize coordinator will then email a summary of the votes to the committee and provide them with a summary of this conversation. If any difficulties, logistic, expense related, or otherwise, have surfaced then the executive committee will have an opportunity to air their views on how best to proceed.

9) If the nominated winner withdraws then it will usually be understood that the next highest scoring candidate will be considered the winner. However, any member of the committee and/or the prize coordinator may propose that second election be held, with or without a further round of nominations. This will proceed only if a majority of the executive committee assents. At any time during this process any member of the executive committee and/or the prize coordinator may call for a vote to withhold the prize for that year. If a majority of the executive committee assents, then the prize will be held over until the next year.

Past Winners

Stanton Prize

2009, Joshua Knobe (Philosophy, Yale University)

2008, Laurie Santos (Psychology, Yale University)

2007, John Doris (PNP, Washington University, St. Louis)

2006, Fei Xu (Psychology, University of British Columbia)

2005, Shaun Nichols (Philosophy, University of Arizona)

2004, David Chalmers (Philosophy, Australian National University)

2003, Jesse Prinz (Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

2002, Paul Bloom (Psychology, Yale University)

2001, Kathleen Akins (Philosophy, Simon Frasier University)

William James Prize

2009, Justin Sytsma and Jonathan Livengood (History & Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh)
A New Perspective Concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions

2008, Justin Sytsma (History & Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh)
Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience

2007, Chad Gonnerman (Philosophy, Indiana University)
What Do We See in Others? An Empirical Follow-up to Knobe and Roedder

2006, Liane Young (Psychology, Harvard University)
Moral Judgment is More Consequentialist in Individuals with Ventromedial Prefrontal Damage

2005, Adam Shriver (Philosophy, Texas A&M Univ.; Washington University, St. Louis)
Neural Correlates of Suffering

2004, Tania Lombrozo (Psychology, Harvard)
Teleological Explanation: Causal Constraints and Regularities

2004, Justin Fisher (Philosophy, Arizona)
Does Simulation Theory Really Involve Simulation?

2003, Reese M. Heitner (Philosophy & Linguistics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)
The Cyclical Ontogeny of Ontology: An Integrated Developmental Account of Object and Speech Categorization

2002, Adina Roskies (Philosophy, MIT)
Are Ethical Judgments Intrinsically Motivational? Lessons from 'acquired sociopathy'

2001, Jonathan Weinberg (Philosophy, Rutgers)
Conceptual Analysis and the Diversity of Intuitions

2000, Pete Mandik (Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, Washington University , St. Louis)
Physical Subjectivity: Points of View from the Brain's Eye View

1999, Stephanie Beardman (Philosophy, Rutgers)
The Choice Between Actual and Remembered Pain

1998, Pete Mandik, (Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, Washington University, St. Louis)
Action and Experience: Motor Control and Spatial Qualia

1997, Brian Scholl (Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers)
Cognitive Architecture and Cognitive Development: Two Senses of 'Surprise'

Poster Prize

2009, Robert Lurz (Brooklyn College, CUNY)
If Chimpanzees are Mindreaders, Could Behavioral Science Tell?

2008, S. Kate Devitt (Rutgers University), Remembering Beliefs

and

Jonathan Weinberg, Joshua Alexander and Chad Gonnerman (Indiana University), Unstable Intuitions and Need for Cognition: How Being Thoughtful Sometimes Just Means Being Wrong in a Different Way

2007, Deena Skolnick Weisberg (Yale University)
The Origin of Imaginary Companions