Anderson was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 3, 1943. He received a B.S. in
Linguistics from the
Illinois Institute of Technology in 1966 and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. Anderson taught at
Harvard University from 1969 until 1975. He joined the faculty of the
University of California, Los Angeles, in 1975. In 1988, he became a professor of cognitive science at
Johns Hopkins University. He joined the faculty at
Yale University in 1994, where he remained until his retirement in 2017. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1988–89. Anderson was elected a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1993, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, Anderson died on October 13, 2025, at his home in Asheville, North Carolina. ==Selected publications==