---
title: "Keith Stenning"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Keith Stenning"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["conditional reasoning","closed-world reasoning","Michiel van Lambalgen","Wason selection task","semantics of natural-language conditionals"]
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


Cognitive scientist at the Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, who with [[entity-michiel-van-lambalgen|Michiel van Lambalgen]] developed a semantics-first, logic-programming account of human conditional reasoning — the argument that much apparent "irrationality" in tasks like the [[entity-peter-wason|Wason]] selection task is really unnoticed work at the interpretation stage, best modelled by [[entity-closed-world-assumption|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 [[entity-mike-oaksford|Oaksford]] and [[entity-nick-chater|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