Reasoning is the cognitive Cognition is the scientific term for "the process of thought." Usage of the term varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Other interpretations of the meaning of cognition link it to the development of process of looking for reasons Reason is a mental faculty found in humans, that is able to generate conclusions from assumptions or premises. In other words, it is amongst other things the means by which rational beings propose reasons, or explanations of cause and effect. In contrast to reason as an abstract noun, a reason is a consideration which explains or justifies, beliefs Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true, conclusions A conclusion is a proposition which is reached after considering the evidence, arguments or premises. Conclusions are a fundamental feature in academic or research work, actions Action theory is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing intentional human bodily movements of more or less complex kind. This area of thought has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Third Book). With the advent of psychology and later neuroscience, many or feelings Feeling is the nominalization of "to feel". The word was first used in the English language to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe experiences, other than the physical sensation of touch, such as "a feeling of warmth". In psychology, the word is.^[1]

Different forms of such reflection on reasoning occur in different fields. In philosophy Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. The word "philosophy" comes from the, the study of reasoning typically focuses on what makes reasoning efficient or inefficient, appropriate or inappropriate, good or bad. Philosophers do this by either examining the form or structure of the reasoning within arguments, or by considering the broader methods used to reach particular goals of reasoning. Psychologists Psychology is the study of human or animal mental functions and behaviors. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is a psychologist. Psychologists are classified as social or behavioral scientists. Psychological research can be considered either basic or applied. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in and cognitive scientists, in contrast, tend to study how people reason The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It is at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory, which cognitive and neural processes are engaged, how cultural factors affect the inferences people draw. The properties of logic Logic is the study of arguments. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, and computer science. Logic examines general forms which arguments may take, which forms are valid, and which are fallacies. It is one kind of critical thinking. In philosophy, the study of logic which may be used to reason are studied in mathematical logic Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics. The unifying themes in mathematical logic include the study of the expressive power of formal systems and the. The field of automated reasoning Automated reasoning is an area of computer science dedicated to understanding different aspects of reasoning in a way that allows the creation of software which allows computers to reason completely or nearly completely, automatically. As such, it is usually considered a subfield of artificial intelligence, but it also has strong connections to studies how reasoning may be modelled computationally. Lawyers also study reasoning.

History of reasoning

It is likely that humans have used reasoning to work out what they should believe or do for a very long time. However, some researchers have tried to determine when, in the history of human development, humans began using formal techniques of reasoning.

Babylonian reasoning

In Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, as well as some parts of northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and southwestern Iran, Esagil-kin-apli's medical Diagnostic Handbook written in the 11th century BC was based on a logical set of axioms In traditional logic, an axiom or postulate is a proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be either self-evident, or subject to necessary decision. Therefore, its truth is taken for granted, and serves as a starting point for deducing and inferring other truths and assumptions, including the modern view that through the examination and inspection of the symptoms of a patient, it is possible to determine the patient's disease, its aetiology and future development, and the chances of the patient's recovery.^[2]

During the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Babylonian astronomers began employing an internal logic In logic, a consistent theory is one that does not contain a contradiction. The lack of contradiction can be defined in either semantic or syntactic terms. The semantic definition states that a theory is consistent if it has a model; this is the sense used in traditional Aristotelian logic, although in contemporary mathematical logic the term within their predictive planetary systems, which was an important contribution to logic and the philosophy of science The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. In addition to these central problems for science as a whole, many philosophers of science consider these problems as they apply to particular sciences . Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science to draw.^[3] Babylonian Babylonia was an ancient cultural region in central-southern Mesopotamia , with Babylon as its capital. Babylonia emerged when Hammurabi (fl. ca. 1696 – 1654 BC, short chronology) created an empire out of the territories of the former Akkadian Empire. Babylonia adopted the written Semitic Akkadian language for official use, and retained the thought had a considerable influence on early Greek thought.^[4]

Greek reasoning

The works of Homer Homer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was an historical individual, but most scholars are skeptical: no reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical antiquity, and the poems themselves, written in the 8th century BC, contain mythic stories that use gods to explain the formation of the world. However, only two centuries later, late in the 6th century BC, Xenophanes Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, poet, and social and religious critic. Knowledge of his views comes from fragments of his poetry, surviving as quotations by later Greek writers. To judge from these, his elegiac and iambic poetry criticized and satirized a wide range of ideas, including Homer and Hesiod, the belief in the pantheon of Colophon began to question the Homeric accounts of the creation of nature and the gods. He wrote:

• "Homer and Hesiod attribute all things to the gods that among men are shame and a disgrace" (frag. 11).
• "God is one, greatest among gods and among men, in no way like men in form and thought" (frag. 23).
• "If oxen and horses and lions had hands or could paint and make things with their hands like men, then they would paint the forms of gods and make their bodies each according to their own shapes, horses like horses, oxen like oxen" (frag. 15).

According to David Furley, "the basis of [Xenophanes'] criticism appears to have been that he saw an inconsistency between the concept of god as something different from man, and the stories told about the gods, which made them behave as men do."^[5] In the same period, other Greek thinkers began to develop theories about the nature of the world that suggest that they believed that there were regularities in nature and that humans could use reasoning to develop a consistent story about the nature of the world. Thales Thales of Miletus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition. According to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales." Thales attempted to explain natural phenomena without of Miletus, c. 624 BC – c. 546 BC, proposed that all is water. Anaximenes of Miletus, c. 585 BC – c. 525 BC, claimed that air is the source of everything.^[5]

Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most is, so far as we know, the first writer to give an extended, systematic treatment of the methods of human reasoning. He identified two major methods of reasoning, analysis and synthesis. In the first, we try to understand an object by looking at its component parts. In the second, we try to understand a class of objects by looking at the common properties of each object in that class.

Aristotle developed what is known as syllogistic logic A syllogism or logical appeal is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is inferred from two others (the premises) of a certain form, which makes it possible to analyse reasoning in a way that ignores the content of the argument and focuses on the form or structure of the argument.^[6] In the Prior Analytics Prior Analytics is Aristotle's work on deductive reasoning, specifically the syllogism. It is also part of his Organon, which is the instrument or manual of logical and scientific methods, Aristotle begins by pointing out that:

"[If] no pleasure is a good, neither will any good be a pleasure."^[7]

He then argues that this argument is an example of a rule of reasoning of the following form:

Premise: "Aristotle is Greek" and "All Greeks are human"

Conclusion: "Aristotle is human"

Aristotle points out that by understanding the reasoning involved in this type of argument, we can know that whatever the As and Bs are, we can reach the same conclusion about the relationship between them. This is a simple and straightforward argument, but it is a sign of an amazing leap in understanding and research into reason and was the beginning of the development of formal logic Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics. The unifying themes in mathematical logic include the study of the expressive power of formal systems and the.

Indian reasoning

Two of the six Indian schools of thought deal with logic: Nyaya Nyāya is the name given to one of the six orthodox or astika schools of Hindu philosophy—specifically the school of logic. The Nyaya school of philosophical speculation is based on texts known as the Nyaya Sutras, which were written by Aksapada Gautama from around the 2nd century CE and Vaisheshika Vaisheshika, or Vaiśeṣika, is one of the six Hindu schools of philosophy (orthodox Vedic systems) of India. Historically, it has been closely associated with the Hindu school of logic, Nyaya. The Nyaya Sutras The Nyāya Sūtras are an ancient Indian text on of philosophy composed by Akṣapāda Gautama of Aksapada Gautama The Nyāya Sūtras are an ancient Indian text on of philosophy composed by Akṣapāda Gautama constitute the core texts of the Nyaya school, one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu A Hindu ( pronunciation , Devanagari: हिन्दु) is an adherent of Hinduism, a set of religious, philosophical and cultural systems that originated in the Indian subcontinent. The vast body of Hindu scriptures, divided into Śruti ("revealed") and Smriti ("remembered"), lay the foundation of Hindu beliefs, which philosophy. This realist Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality. We may speak of realism with respect to other minds, the past, school developed a rigid five-member schema of inference Inference is the process of drawing a conclusion by applying heuristics to observations or hypotheses; or by interpolating the next logical step in an intuited pattern. The conclusion drawn is also called an inference. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic involving an initial premise, a reason, an example, an application and a conclusion. The idealist Idealism is the philosophical theory which maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on the mind or ideas. In the philosophy of perception, idealism is contrasted with realism in which the external world is said to have an apparent absolute existence. Epistemological idealists claim that the only things which can be directly known for Buddhist philosophy Buddhist philosophy deals extensively with problems in metaphysics, phenomenology, ethics, and epistemology became the chief opponent to the Naiyayikas. Nagarjuna Acharya Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE) was an Indian philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism[citation needed], the founder of the Madhyamika Mādhyamaka is a Buddhist Mahāyāna tradition systematized by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna may have arrived at his positions from a desire to achieve a consistent exegesis of the Buddha's doctrine as recorded in the āgamas. To Nāgārjuna, the Buddha was not merely a forerunner, but the very founder of the Mādhyamaka system. The tradition and its "Middle Way" developed an analysis known as the "catuskoti" or tetralemma A similar tradition of fourfold negation, the Catuskoti , is evident in the logico-epistemological tradition of India, given the categorical nomenclature 'Indian logic' in Western discourse. Subsumed within the auspice of Indian logic, 'Buddhist logic' has been particularly focused in its employ of the fourfold negation, as evidenced by the. This four-cornered argumentation systematically examined and rejected the affirmation of a proposition, its denial, the joint affirmation and denial, and finally, the rejection of its affirmation and denial. But it was with Dignaga Dignāga (c 480-540 CE) was an Indian scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic and his successor Dharmakirti Dharmakīrti , was an Indian scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian philosophical logic. He was one of the primary theorists of Buddhist atomism, according to which the only items considered to exist are momentary Buddhist atoms and states of consciousness[citation needed] that Buddhist logic reached its height. Their analysis centred on the definition of necessary logical entailment In logic, entailment is a relation between sets of sentences and a sentence. Typically entailment is defined in terms of necessary truth preservation: some set T of sentences entails a sentence A if and only if it is necessary that A be true whenever each member of T is true, "vyapti", also known as invariable concomitance or pervasion. To this end a doctrine known as "apoha" or differentiation was developed. This involved what might be called inclusion and exclusion of defining properties. The difficulties involved in this enterprise, in part, stimulated the neo-scholastic school of Navya-Nyāya The Navya-Nyāya or Neo-Logical darśana of Indian logic and Indian philosophy was founded in the 13th century CE by the philosopher Gangeśa Upādhyāya of Mithila. It was a development of the classical Nyāya darśana. Other influences on Navya-Nyāya were the work of earlier philosophers Vācaspati Miśra (900–980 CE) and Udayana (late 10th, which developed a formal analysis of inference in the 16th century.

Chinese reasoning

In China, a contemporary of Confucius His philosophy emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity. These values gained prominence in China over other doctrines, such as Legalism or Taoism (道家) during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). Confucius' thoughts have been developed into a system of philosophy known as, Mozi There has been considerable debate about the actual name of Mozi. Traditionally, Mozi was said to have inherited the surname "Mo" from his supposed ancestor, the Lord of Guzhu (Chinese: 孤 , "Master Mo", is credited with founding the Mohist school Mohism or Moism was a Chinese philosophy developed by the followers of Mozi (also referred to as Mo Tzu (Master Mo), Latinized as Micius), 470 BCE–c.391 BCE. It evolved at about the same time as Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism and was one of the four main philosophic schools during the Spring and Autumn Period (from 770 BCE to 480 BCE) and the, whose canons dealt with issues relating to valid inference and the conditions of correct conclusions. In particular, one of the schools that grew out of Mohism, the Logicians The Logicians or School of Names was a Chinese philosophical school that grew out of Mohism in the Warring States Period 479-221 B.C.E, are credited by some scholars for their early investigation of formal logic Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics. The unifying themes in mathematical logic include the study of the expressive power of formal systems and the. Unfortunately, due to the harsh rule of Legalism In Chinese history, Legalism was one of the main philosophic currents during the Warring States Period (and before), although the term itself was invented in the Han dynasty and thus does not refer to an organized 'school' of thought. The trends that were later called Legalism have in common a focus on strengthening the political power of the in the subsequent Qin Dynasty The Qin Dynasty was the ruling Chinese dynasty between 221 and 206 BC. The Qin state derived its name from its heartland of Qin, in modern-day Shaanxi. The Qin's strength had been consolidated by Lord Shang Yang during the Warring States Period, in the 4th century BC. In the early third century BC, the Qin accomplished a series of swift conquests;, this line of investigation disappeared in China until the introduction of Indian philosophy by Buddhists Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE. He is recognized by adherents as an.

Islamic reasoning

For a time after prophet Muhammad's death, Islamic law placed importance on formulating standards of argument, which gave rise to a novel approach to logic in Kalam, but this approach was later influenced by ideas from Greek philosophy and Hellenistic philosophy with the rise of the Mu'tazili philosophers, who highly valued Aristotle's Organon. The works of Hellenistic-influenced Islamic philosophers were crucial in the reception of Aristotelian logic in medieval Europe, along with the commentaries on the Organon by Averroes. The works of al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and other Muslim logicians who often criticized and corrected Aristotelian logic and introduced their own forms of logic, also played a central role in the subsequent development of medieval European logic.

Islamic logic not only included the study of formal patterns of inference and their validity but also elements of the philosophy of language and elements of epistemology and metaphysics. Due to disputes with Arabic grammarians, Islamic philosophers were very interested in working out the relationship between logic and language, and they devoted much discussion to the question of the subject matter and aims of logic in relation to reasoning and speech. In the area of formal logical analysis, they elaborated upon the theory of terms, propositions and syllogisms. They considered the syllogism to be the form to which all rational argumentation could be reduced, and they regarded syllogistic theory as the focal point of logic. Even poetics was considered as a syllogistic art in some fashion by many major Islamic logicians.

Important developments made by Muslim logicians included the development of "Avicennian logic" as a replacement of Aristotelian logic. Avicenna's system of logic was responsible for the introduction of hypothetical syllogism,^[8] temporal modal logic,^[9][10] and inductive logic.^[11][12] Other important developments in Islamic philosophy include the development of a strict citation practice, the isnad or "backing", and the development of a scientific method of open inquiry to disprove claims, the ijtihad, which could be generally applied to many types of questions.

Reasoning methods and argumentation

One approach to the study of reasoning is to identify various forms of reasoning that may be used to support or justify conclusions. The main division between forms of reasoning that is made in philosophy is between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Formal logic has been described as "the science of deduction".^[13] The study of inductive reasoning is generally carried out within the field known as informal logic or critical thinking.

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