John Norton won the 2026 Lakatos Award

John D. Norton, Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has won the 2026 Lakatos Award for two books on how science learns from evidence.

The award is given annually for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science in the form of a book published in English within the past six years. The winner is selected by an international committee organized from the London School of Economics.

Norton was honored for “The Material Theory of Induction” and “The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference,” both published in the open access series BSPS Open and available for download on Norton’s faculty site.

The books argue against the idea that inductive inference runs on universal logical rules. “Induction,” the work of drawing broad conclusions from a small sample of evidence, describes the way a handful of experiments becomes a scientific claim. Philosophers have spent centuries looking for universal rules that separate sound conclusions from the flawed ones, but, according to Norton’s work, no such rules exist. What makes an inference trustworthy is the established facts of the particular field to which it belongs.

Norton, a member of the Dietrich School’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science since 1983, is the fourth current or emeritus member of the department’s faculty to win the Lakatos Award. Previous recipients include John Earman in 1989, James Woodward in 2005 and David Wallacea, a joint winner in 2013.