Keith Stenning is a cognitive scientist and Honorary Professor at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

, UK. He attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School (U.K.) from 1959 to 1965, where he won an Open Scholarship in Natural Sciences at

Trinity College, Oxford (That which you wish to be secret, tell to nobody) , named_for = The Holy Trinity , established = , sister_college = Churchill College, Cambridge , president = Dame Hilary Boulding , location = Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BH , coordinates ...

Career

Stenning received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and psychology at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

in 1969, and a PhD in discourse semantics as a basis for a theory of memory in New York, 1975, supervised by

George Armitage Miller George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Mille ...

. Between 1975 and 1983 he taught at

Liverpool University , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

before moving to Edinburgh to the Centre for Cognitive Science in 1983. Between 1989 and 1999 he was the director of the Human Communication Research Centre. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the

Cognitive Science Society The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society prom ...

and a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Netherlands National Academy. He was chairman of an Expert Group gathered by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

Directorate-General for Research which proposed some lines of evolutionary cognitive research under the title "What it Means to be Human". His main research interest is integrating logical and psychological accounts of

reasoning Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, lang ...

. Recent work includes investigations of interpretative processes in reasoning and, with

Michiel van Lambalgen Michiel van Lambalgen (born 6 November 1954, Krimpen aan den IJssel) is a professor of Logic and Cognitive Science at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and the Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. ...

at the

Institute for Logic, Language and Computation The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a research institute of the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities collaborate. The ILLC's central research area is the st ...

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

, the use of

non-monotonic logic A non-monotonic logic is a formal logic whose conclusion relation is not monotonic. In other words, non-monotonic logics are devised to capture and represent defeasible inferences (cf. defeasible reasoning), i.e., a kind of inference in which rea ...

and

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

implementations to model reasoning. His most recent books have dealt with how the mind responds to different representations of the same information and his 2008 book with

discusses the relevance of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. He became a foreign member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

in 2005.

Notes

External links

Keith Stenning's web page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stenning, Keith Academics of the University of Edinburgh Living people British psychologists Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences People educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society Year of birth missing (living people)