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Normative reasons are what people appeal to when making arguments about what people should do or believe. For example, that a doctor's patient is grimacing is a reason to believe the patient is in pain. That the patient is in pain is a reason for the doctor to do things to alleviate the pain. Explanatory reasons are explanations of why things ...
Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. [1] It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans.
It contrasts with theoretical reason, often called speculative reason, the use of reason to decide what to follow. For example, agents use practical reason to decide whether to build a telescope , but theoretical reason to decide which of two theories of light and optics is the best.
The purpose of arguments is to convince a person that something is the case by providing reasons for this belief. [25] [26] Many arguments in natural language do not explicitly state all the premises. Instead, the premises are often implicitly assumed, especially if they seem obvious and belong to common sense.
For example, it has been argued that certain insights of quantum mechanics refute the principle of distributivity in classical logic, which states that the formula () is equivalent to () (). This claim can be used as an empirical argument for the thesis that quantum logic is the correct logical system and should replace classical logic.
Analogical reasoning is one of the most common methods by which human beings try to understand the world and make decisions. [1] When a person has a bad experience with a product and decides not to buy anything further from the producer, this is often a case of analogical reasoning since the two products share a maker and are therefore both ...
According to reason-responsiveness accounts, to be rational is to be responsive to reasons. For example, dark clouds are a reason for taking an umbrella, which is why it is rational for an agent to do so in response. An important rival to this approach are coherence-based accounts, which define rationality as internal coherence among the agent ...
In moral philosophy, instrumental and intrinsic value are the distinction between what is a means to an end and what is as an end in itself. [1] Things are deemed to have instrumental value (or extrinsic value [2]) if they help one achieve a particular end; intrinsic values, by contrast, are understood to be desirable in and of themselves.