Institut Jean Nicod

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MASCARENHAS Salvador

Professeur des universités, ENS

 

CONTACT ǀ Tel : 01 44 32 26 61

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Équipe

CONCEPTS, LOGIQUE, RAISONNEMENT

 

I am a Professeur des universités (“full professor” in the US system) at Ecole Normale Supérieure’s Department of Cognitive Studies (DEC) and a member of Institut Jean Nicod. I got my PhD at New York University’s Department of Linguistics in 2014, where I wrote a dissertation on the relationship between human reasoning, natural language semantics, and the philosophy of language. Between 2014 and 2016, I was a Junior Research Fellow with St Catherine’s College, Oxford, affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy. My work is at the intersection of linguistic semantics, philosophy of language, and the psychology of reasoning.

Research in linguistic semantics and the philosophy of language in the past forty years has produced sophisticated mathematical models that represent the meanings of natural language utterances and explain how meanings relate to one another to form entailment patterns. At the same time, research on human reasoning within psychology has discovered a wealth of fallacious inference patterns, establishing that human reasoning is fallible in highly predictable ways. The psychological study of reasoning has been characterized by extensive experimental work analyzed in terms of theories focusing on the processes of reasoning. On the other hand, linguistic semantics has a longstanding tradition of formal rigor and a focus on logical thinking, but it has so far largely ignored fallacies. The two fields overlap significantly, but they have progressed almost completely in parallel, with little interaction. The main aim of my research is to fill that gap by extending linguistic semantics to the study of human reasoning. Please visit my professional website for more information.


CNRS EHESS ENS ENS