Reasoning is closely related to thinking, and one of its meanings is rationality or thinking that is based on certain rules versus emotion. It may mean evidence or argument, that is, proof of the validity of an opinion, decision, or belief, or it is the means by which a decision is reached.
In logic and philosophy, reasoning means the ability to deduce and extrapolate, and it may mean generating new knowledge from previously known information.
The concept of Reasoning
Reasoning is a mental process that involves placing information, situations, or experiences in an organized way so that it leads to a logical conclusion or leads to a decision or solution to a problem.
Some researchers believe that reasoning is a thinking skill that acts as a facilitator for implementing or practicing information processing processes that include interpretation, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, and includes inductive, deductive, and representative reasoning.
Others believe that reasoning is the sum of mental processes that are used to form and evaluate beliefs, and to demonstrate the truth or falsity of claims. These processes include the skill of generating and evaluating arguments, searching for evidence, arriving at specific results, and identifying connections and causal relationships between things.
Reasoning aims to generate new knowledge through available information and evidence, and justification aims to reach a conclusion consistent with the goals and objectives of the justifying person. Reasoning requires the individual’s ability to control language, comprehend it, understand its meanings and connotations, and to store it quantitatively and cognitively in order to build the components of the logical argument.
Characteristics of Reasoning
An inference is characterized by validity or invalidity. It is either correct, incorrect, or invalid.
The correct reasoning is the reasoning that fulfills the conditions of form or form (two premises, a connection, and a result), which makes the result necessary for the premises without regard to their content, i.e. the content of the premises.
As for correct inference, it is the inference in which the conditions for validity must be met, in addition to the truthfulness of the cognitive content of its premises. Perhaps scientific inferences are the best example of this:
example:
All metals conduct electricity (major introduction)
Copper is a metal (minor introduction)
Copper conducts electricity (result)
Therefore, a correct inference is an inference that satisfies its form, that is, does not violate any of the conditions of inference and satisfies the validity of the content of the premises.
Types of reasoning
Inferences in logic are divided into three types:
First: deductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning is reasoning in which the result is hidden in the premises. The effort expended in the science of deduction is to reveal the result that was hidden and not apparent in its premises, and that the deductive result does not provide us with new knowledge that we did not know from the premises.
example:
All Birds Lay Eggs (Intro)
The parrot is a bird (introduction)
So the parrot lays eggs (result)
The rule with which we described birds, which is that they lay eggs, applies to parrots, and the conclusion was not apparent in the introduction, and all we did was extract it from the introductions.
Types of deductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning is divided in form into the following:
- Conditional or hypothetical inference: It consists of a major premise formulated hypothetically and a minor premise, which is a presumptive proposition and a result inferred from the two premises. As for the major premise, it is a conditional proposition consisting of two conditions linked by a conditional formula.
example:
If you study, you will succeed (major introduction)
You are studying (Minor Introduction)
If you will succeed (result)
The result is true if we assume the truth of the information contained in the two premises.
- Predicate reasoning: It consists of two premises (minor and major) and a conclusion, in the form of a declarative sentence consisting of a subject and a predicate. The predicate case includes a clear ruling, either to prove an attribute or information for the predicate about it (the subject or the bearer of the adjective), such as saying meat is a useful food, or to deny it. The attribute or information is like when we say meat is not enough food.
Second: inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning is reasoning in which we study and examine individual cases of a subject, case, or phenomenon, and then deduce a general judgment that applies to all individuals of the subject, case, or phenomenon. The information about the individual cases is the premises, and the general judgment is the conclusion.
An example of this: An educational supervisor visits a classroom in a school, to find out the level of its students in a subject. He asks some of the students questions and gets answers to them, and through that he issues a judgment about the students’ level, such as saying that their level is excellent, good, or weak.
In this case, the supervisor’s extrapolation was incomplete because he did not ask all the students, but rather asked some of them, and therefore:
- Incomplete induction: It is studying some cases of a phenomenon or some individuals of a particular subject and concluding a judgment on it. It may be the opposite, where the supervisor conducts a test for all students and corrects their papers and then arrives at a judgment on their level. This is complete induction.
- Complete induction: is the study of all cases of a phenomenon, or individuals of a particular subject, and then arriving at a judgment on them.
Third: Representative reasoning
It is an inference in which we transfer a specific description or ruling from a specific case to another case due to the similarities between the two cases, and the result of this inference is often speculative.
Example: A student may conduct an experiment on a metal such as iron with an acid in some way and some products, and the same results are assumed for copper metal, which is not true.