🧠 Critical Thinking Lecture 2: Reasoning

Key Concepts

Reason

• Definition: The capacity to engage in the activity of reasoning.
• Function: The ability to make inferences.

Reasoning

• Definition: A mental process where the mind moves from one thought to another.
• Function: The process of making inferences.

Inference

• Judging that some proposition is rationally supported.

Proposition

• A statement that may be true or false.

Belief

• A thought that a subject takes to be true or false.

Rules of Reasoning

• Do not believe both p and not-p (consistency).
• If you believe “if p then q” and you believe p, then you ought to believe q (consistency in logic).