Keith Stenning is a

cognitive scientist Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

and Honorary Professor at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

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

Trinity College, Oxford Trinity College (full name: The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the University of Oxford, of the foundation of Sir Thomas Pope (Knight)) is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford in E ...

Career

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

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

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. Miller ...

. Between 1975 and 1983 he taught at

Liverpool University The University of Liverpool (abbreviated UOL) is a public research university in Liverpool, England. Founded in 1881 as University College Liverpool, Victoria University, it received Royal Charter by King Edward VII in 1903 attaining the de ...

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 primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

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 valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, scien ...

. Recent work includes investigations of interpretative processes in reasoning and, with Michiel van Lambalgen 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 s ...

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...

, the use of

non-monotonic logic A non-monotonic logic is a formal logic whose entailment relation is not monotonic. In other words, non-monotonic logics are devised to capture and represent defeasible inferences, i.e., a kind of inference in which reasoners draw tentative concl ...

and

neural network A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...

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 Michiel van Lambalgen 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 (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. In addition to various advisory a ...

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)