Elizabeth J. Bell

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. My areas of interest include Logic, Rationality, Cognitive Science, and Aesthetics. I am particularly interested in the intersection of all four. My Dissertation aims to create a foundation for a logic of images. We use images in our everyday reasoning. We use diagrams to reason about complex sets of data and maps to help us navigate our world. Regrettably, mainstream logics and research programs about rational decision-making focus exclusively on the implication relations between sentences and are unable to model the work we do when we reason imagistically. Since it is apparent that imagistic beliefs play a substantial role in reasoning, this means that there is a significant gap in the research in these areas. The work in this dissertation hopes to remedy that by presenting a foundation for a logic for images.