Methods and Models of Reasoning in Systems (MeMoR) Research Group

The Methods and Models of Reasoning in Systems (MeMoR) Research Group studies reasoning as it takes place in the world: within people, between people, through language, under norms, and increasingly through artificial systems. We are interested not only in how reasoning works in isolation, but in how it is shaped by the systems in which it is embedded, and how individual acts of reasoning can give rise to broader patterns of interaction, disagreement, coordination, and collective decision-making.

Our research explores processes such as inference, argumentation, belief revision, explanation, decision-making, disagreement, coordination, and normative reasoning. We ask how these processes change when information is incomplete or conflicting, when agents have different perspectives and goals, and when reasoning is mediated by language, social structures, institutions, or computational systems.

A central concern is the relationship between individual and collective reasoning. How do individual judgments become shared beliefs? How do disagreements emerge and persist? How do norms shape what counts as a good reason? How do local interactions produce collective patterns, and how do those patterns feed back into individual reasoning?

To address these questions, MeMoR brings together formal and computational modelling, conceptual analysis, and experimental philosophy. We move between theory and observation, developing models that are precise enough to be analysed and rich enough to engage with actual reasoning practices. When existing approaches do not capture the phenomenon adequately, we develop new ones.

This methodological openness is central to MeMoR. We are not committed to a single theory of reasoning or a fixed way of studying it. Instead, we use the problem itself to guide the choice and development of methods. Concepts are clarified, structures are formalised, models are built, assumptions are tested, and findings are used to reshape the models and the questions that motivated them.

MeMoR is therefore centred on an emerging research theme: understanding how reasoning works within complex systems, from individual inference to interaction, collective reasoning, and system-level outcomes. Our aim is not simply to apply established methods to familiar problems, but to develop new ways of thinking about, modelling, and investigating reasoning wherever it becomes complex, distributed, and consequential.