Keith Stenning

Cognitive scientist at the Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, who with Michiel van Lambalgen developed a semantics-first, logic-programming account of human conditional reasoning — the argument that much apparent "irrationality" in tasks like the Wason selection task is really unnoticed work at the interpretation stage, best modelled by closed-world, non-monotonic logic rather than the classical material conditional.

He matters to this vault as one half of the author-pair whose account is the non-Bayesian rival to Oaksford and Chater's probabilistic rehabilitation of the same data — a lineage the vault previously held only through Sakama's second-hand paraphrase and now holds from Stenning & van Lambalgen's own 2001 and 2004 primaries.

References

• claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-model-wason-fallacies-as-closed-world-reasoning · claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-do-not-use-negation-as-failure-in-2001-2004-papers · claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-distinguish-reasoning-for-vs-from-an-interpretation · claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-two-clause-exception-scheme-not-material-conditional
• claim-logic-programming-account-rivals-probabilistic-account-of-conditional-reasoning
• Captures: 2026-08-31-do-stenning-van-lambalgen-actually-model-the-wason