---
title: "Michiel van Lambalgen"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Michiel van Lambalgen"
aliases: ["Michiel van Lambalgen","M. van Lambalgen"]
first_seen: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["conditional reasoning","closed-world reasoning","Keith Stenning","non-monotonic logic","logic and cognitive science"]
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


Logician and cognitive scientist at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, where he is Professor of Logic and Cognitive Science. With [[entity-keith-stenning|Keith Stenning]] he built a formal, semantics-first account of human conditional reasoning that treats the "fallacies" of the [[entity-peter-wason|Wason]] selection task as systematic [[entity-closed-world-assumption|closed-world]], non-monotonic inference — reasoning *for* an interpretation, not just *from* one.

He matters to this vault as the logician half of the Stenning–van Lambalgen pair whose logic-programming account is the vault's non-Bayesian rival to the [[entity-mike-oaksford|Oaksford]]–[[entity-nick-chater|Chater]] probabilistic account of the same reasoning data, now grounded in their 2001 and 2004 primaries rather than a downstream paraphrase.

## 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