[RosieCotton]

I'd say both. ;-) Mostly he's just full of himself, to the point where he thinks he knows everything about everything...and he doesn't.

[Fedora]

I figured a lot of it was him being full of himself. I'm starting to wonder if there's also something besides that, though. I get the feeling maybe his arrogance led him to use Kivrin as a guinea pig for a dangerous experiment that went wrong or something, and now he's trying to cover up for himself by blaming others.