Teaching and research interests overlap in the following areas:
Pragmatics and reasoning: It is still true today that the greatest explanatory challenges for cognitive theorists lie, not in understanding how deliberate, conscious reasoning proceeds, but in explaining the reasoning processes that are involved in a range of more mundane activities. These activities are performed effortlessly and include, most notably, utterance interpretation. As the study of this interpretation, pragmatics has the potential to contribute important insights to questions about the nature of mundane reasoning processes. The fact that this potential has been largely unexplored to date is an issue that is redressed in my research on pragmatics and reasoning.
Scientific reasoning: Scientists are routinely compelled to reason about problems in the absence of knowledge and evidence. This reasoning proceeds by means of heuristics (strategies) that are pragmatic and presumptive in nature. In this area of her research, the role of so-called informal fallacies in the initial stage of scientific inquiries into BSE and AIDS is examined. This stage of inquiry is noteworthy on account of its marked evidential bereftness and the urgency with which questions must be addressed. Quite apart from being fallacious, informal fallacies, it emerges, confer numerous epistemic benefits upon the inquiries of which they are a part.
Communication disorders: The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists estimates that 2.5 million people in the UK have a communication disorder. Of this number, some 800,000 people have a disorder that is so severe that it is hard for anyone outside their immediate families to understand them. Louise teaches and researches the various developmental and acquired communication disorders that constitute these large and growing figures. She considers the epidemiology and aetiology of these disorders, their clinical presentation and how they are assessed and treated by clinicians.
