Ronald Giere was a very close friend, professionally and personally, over decades. He was the kind of ideal mentor one seeks, and is all too rare. He was the only person I sent my doctoral dissertation to (while still a grad student)—and he read it thoroughly! He encouraged me to submit a paper to the Philosophy of Science Association that first year, and it became my first publication. Giere was one of the few non-Bayesian philosophers of science at the time, and I learned an immense amount from his work on probability and the philosophy and history of the statistics of Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, and Alan Birnbaum (with whom Giere worked for a time in NYC). He leaned toward a Neyman-Pearson account of inference as decision-making, coupled with a view of probability as propensity. Through decades of papers, books, grant applications, letter-writing and reviews, Giere was an unfailing supporter, astute critic, and deeply insightful synthesizer; at conferences, he was a most reliable blocker of all forms of harassing conduct. When he decided to leave philosophy of statistics for other areas of philosophy of science (around 2000), Ron asked me if I wanted a treasure trove of papers on statistical foundations that he’d gathered over many years. I said yes. The hundreds of neatly labelled files also contained early drafts, paper mimeo versions of papers, and, best of all, hand-written comments Giere had exchanged with Birnbaum and others, while they were still working through the ideas.[1] In October 2015, he visited us, and I was able to show him the home of file cabinets I created for his collection of papers. I’ve had my best philosophical conversations with Ronald Giere; I’m crushed that our long-running conversation is over. 

 Deborah Mayo