J. D. Trout

J. D. Trout (born 1959) is an American philosopher of science, cognitive scientist, lecturer and nonfiction author who holds the Calamos Endowed Chair in Philosophy at Illinois Institute of Technology.

His research centers on the nature of scientific progress, and its influence on human understanding and well-being.

Trout was born in Cleveland to a mother of Sicilian and Irish heritage, a member of the WAVES 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.

Trout received his bachelor's degree in philosophy and history at Bucknell University in 1982 and his doctorate in philosophy at Cornell University in 1988 under the supervision of Richard Boyd.

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.

Trout authored a number of experimental and theoretical articles on speech perception, 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.

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.

He taught at Loyola University, Chicago for most of his career until moving to IIT in 2018.

Trout was a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and a Sage Graduate Fellow at Cornell University.