Logic

My work in logic is cognitive as much as formal: I am less interested in logic as a closed calculus than in how reasoning actually happens in human minds. My doctoral research offered a logical and cognitive analysis of the concept of thinking, and I have argued for a “cognitivisation” of logic that takes seriously the psychological and embodied conditions under which we infer, decide, and err.

From this angle I work mainly in the theory of argumentation, informal logic, and critical thinking — the tools by which ordinary reasoning can be reconstructed, evaluated, and improved. I am drawn to the places where formal machinery meets messy cognition: the role of analogy in decision-making, the way irrational beliefs shape what we take ourselves to know, and earlier work formalising a “logic of the unconscious mind” through Graham Priest’s semantics of intentionality. This area also anchors my teaching — seminars in theory of argumentation, informal logic, and introduction to logic, and mentoring student debate. My aim throughout is a logic that stays answerable to real thinkers: one that helps people argue more honestly and think more clearly, rather than describing an idealised reasoner who never existed.