What is Reasoning

By Conor McHugh, Jonathan Way. 2018

91 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reasoning is a certain kind of attitude-revision. What kind? The aim of this paper is to introduce and defend a new answer to this question, based on the idea that reasoning is a goodness-fixing kind. Our central claim is that reasoning is a functional kind: it has a constitutive point or aim that fixes the standards for good reasoning. We claim, further, that this aim is to get fitting attitudes. We start by considering recent accounts of reasoning due to Ralph Wedgwood and John Broome, and argue that, while these accounts contain important insights, they are not satisfactory: Wedgwood’s rules out too much, and Broome’s too little. We then introduce and defend our alternative account, discuss some of its implications and attractions, and, finally, consider objections.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a593658677b8b766c671dc84d31b13bb8a8067e0

Citations in the corpus

• Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey (2022, unknown): “Reasoning is the process of thinking about some-thing in a logical and systematic way, using evidence and past experiences to reach a conclusion or make a decision (Wason and Johnson-Laird, 1972; Wason, 1968; Galotti, 1989; Fagin et al., 2004; McHugh and Way, 2018).”