Reason and Individual Reasoning

Reason!: Improving Informal Reasoning Skills

The goal of the Reason! project is to develop an effective and affordable method for improving informal reasoning. In this paper we sketch the background to the project, briefly describe the Reason! software, and report positive results from a detailed study of the first full-scale trial. Introduction One of the greatest challenges facing the Australian educational system in the coming years is...

Reason Maintenance in a Hybrid Reasoning System

One can gain efficiency in an inference system by using special-purpose representations for reasoning about certain predicates, but some such representations make it impossible for the system to keep track of the reasons for which it holds each of its beliefs. We illustrate the potential conflict with some examples, and distill some general principles for designing representations that can supp...

Reason and value: making reasoning fit for practice.

Reader in Applied Philosophy, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, MMU Cheshire, Crewe, UK Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA Associate Professor, Department of General Practice, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Director, University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics, Toronto, ON, Canada Assistant Pr...

Reason, Reasons, and Reasoning: A Constructivist Account of Human Rationality

The concept of rationality has its roots in a historic philosophical conception of human beings as creatures of reason. To act on the basis of reason is to act on the basis of reasons, which in turn implies a process of reasoning. An objectivist conception of rationality sees its essence as lying in the use of reasoning processes that conform to appropriate logical norms. A subjectivist concept...

How Scientists Really Reason: Scientific Reasoning in Real-world Laboratories