Cummings, Louise 1970-

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Cummings, Louise 1970-

PERSONAL:

Born August 6, 1970, in Lurgan, Northern Ireland; daughter of Robert Andrew (an assistant director of social services) and Heather Ann Cummings. Ethnicity: "White." Education: University of Ulster, B.Sc. (hons.), 1993, D.Phil., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Nottingham, England. Office—School of Arts and Humanities, Clifton Campus, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Ln., Nottingham NG11 8NS, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, English language tutor, 1995-2001; Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, England, faculty member, 2001—, currently reader in linguistics. Harvard University, visiting fellow, 1996-97; Cambridge University, visiting fellow at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, 2006. Member of Higher Education Academy, Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, and Health Professions Council.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Eila Campbell Memorial Scholarship, British Federation of Women Graduates, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

Pragmatics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Language & Communication, Informal Logic, Theoria, Argumentation, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Social Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, and Journal of Pragmatics. Issue editor, Philosophica, 2002, and Seminars in Speech and Language, 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Louise Cummings told CA: "My research and writing have always had a strong multidisciplinary bent. After pursuing an undergraduate degree in speech and language therapy at the University of Ulster, I wanted to take a more theoreti- cal direction in my postgraduate studies. My undergraduate dissertation on inferencing in aphasia sparked an interest in the topic of reasoning. Early in my reading for my doctoral studies I came upon the work of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam. Putnam's work was to become the focus of my doctoral thesis. In 1996 and 1997 I had the opportunity to discuss my work with Putnam while I was a visiting fellow in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. I applied a number of Putnam's ideas, particularly his dialectical method in philosophy, to theories and issues in pragmatics, fallacy theory, argumentation, and rhetoric. Much of this work has since been published in international journals.

"Putnam's work has also had a deep influence on my recently published monograph Pragmatics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. This book examines the multidisciplinary character of pragmatics and particularly the interaction between pragmatics and the fields of philosophy, psychology, language pathology, and artificial intelligence.

"I have no desire to work within a single academic discipline. Even at school, my interests spanned science and languages. This is also true today of my academic writing. For example, I am as interested in how we proceed to use and understand language in a range of medical disorders as I am in how philosophers believe language can be about states of affairs in the external world. The opportunity to work between disciplines is one which I deeply value and has a large influence on everything I write.

"I strive in my writing to express complex ideas in as transparent a manner as possible. To achieve clarity of expression, I prefer to write slowly with attention being paid to how each individual sentence contributes to the overall argumentative structure of my text. I believe that a well-written book or journal article should lead the reader by the hand rather than force him or her to engage in logical leaps in order to compensate for deficits on the part of the writer. I want the reader to know that his or her level of understanding is of paramount significance to how I write."