BIO
Michael Scriven is a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University, a Senior Research Associate at the Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University, and Director of Institutional Research at Palo Alto University. He took his bachelor's and master's degrees from the honors school of mathematics at Melbourne University, Australia, and his first two jobs (actually internships) were in mathematical physics. He went on to a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, for a thesis on the logic of explanations in science and history. His fifty years of teaching have been in departments or chairs of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, the history and philosophy of science, law, evaluation, education and as university professor; most of this was done at the Universities of Minnesota, Indiana, California (Berkeley), Western Australia, and Auckland, as well as Swarthmore, Harvard, San Francisco, and currently Claremont Graduate University. His 400+ publications have been mainly in the fields of his appointments and in computer science, informal logic, cosmology, international philanthropy, and technology studies. He has served on the editorial or advisory boards of more than 40 scholarly journals and was elected president of the American Educational Research Association, president of the American Evaluation Association, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Whitehead Fellow at Harvard, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. Recreational efforts include rowing for Melbourne University and the Oxford University Trial Eights, membership in the Frisbee Hall of Fame, and sports car racing, although recently the emphasis has been more on bird-watching, technology studies, and knife-collecting.
