Argument in the context of Discursive reasoning

Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking truth. It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, science, language, and mathematics, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans. Reason is sometimes referred to as rationality, although the latter is more about its application.

Reasoning involves using more-or-less rational processes of thinking and cognition to extrapolate from one's existing knowledge to generate new knowledge, and involves the use of one's intellect. The field of logic studies the ways in which humans can use formal reasoning to produce logically valid arguments and true conclusions. Reasoning may be subdivided into forms of logical reasoning, such as deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and abductive reasoning.

Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. Informal logic examines arguments expressed in natural language whereas formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a specific logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.

Logic studies arguments, which consist of a set of premises that leads to a conclusion. An example is the argument from the premises "it's Sunday" and "if it's Sunday then I don't have to work" leading to the conclusion "I don't have to work." Premises and conclusions express propositions or claims that can be true or false. An important feature of propositions is their internal structure. For example, complex propositions are made up of simpler propositions linked by logical vocabulary like ${\displaystyle \land }$ (and) or ${\displaystyle \to }$ (if...then). Simple propositions also have parts, like "Sunday" or "work" in the example. The truth of a proposition usually depends on the meanings of all of its parts. However, this is not the case for logically true propositions. They are true only because of their logical structure independent of the specific meanings of the individual parts.

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse (trivium) along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences. Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.

Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion", and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he called it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Aristotle also identified three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric, or phases of developing a persuasive speech, were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

Deductive reasoning is the process of drawing valid inferences. An inference is valid if its conclusion follows logically from its premises, meaning that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. For example, the inference from the premises "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" to the conclusion "Socrates is mortal" is deductively valid. An argument is sound if it is valid and all its premises are true. One approach defines deduction in terms of the intentions of the author: they have to intend for the premises to offer deductive support to the conclusion. With the help of this modification, it is possible to distinguish valid from invalid deductive reasoning: it is invalid if the author's belief about the deductive support is false, but even invalid deductive reasoning is a form of deductive reasoning.

Deductive logic studies under what conditions an argument is valid. According to the semantic approach, an argument is valid if there is no possible interpretation of the argument whereby its premises are true and its conclusion is false. The syntactic approach, by contrast, focuses on rules of inference, that is, schemas of drawing a conclusion from a set of premises based only on their logical form. There are various rules of inference, such as modus ponens and modus tollens. Invalid deductive arguments, which do not follow a rule of inference, are called formal fallacies. Rules of inference are definitory rules and contrast with strategic rules, which specify what inferences one needs to draw in order to arrive at an intended conclusion.

Stoicism is an ancient Greek and then Roman philosophy of the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods. The Stoics believed that the universe operated according to reason, or logos, providing a unified account of the world, constructed from ideals of rational discourse, monistic physics, and naturalistic ethics. These three ideals constitute virtue, which is necessary for the Stoic goal of 'living a well-reasoned life'.

Stoic logic focuses on highly intentional reasoning through propositions, arguments, and the differentiation between truth and falsehood. Philosophical discourse is paramount in Stoicism, including the view that the mind is in rational dialogue with itself. Stoic ethics centers on virtue as the highest good, cultivating emotional self-control, a calm problem-solving state of mind, and rational judgment to attain lifelong flourishing (eudaimonia). At the same time, passions, anxieties, and insecurities are viewed as misguided reactions that ought to be controlled through self-disciplined practice. Of all the schools of ancient Western philosophy, Stoicism made the greatest claim to being utterly systematic.

Dialectic (Ancient Greek: διαλεκτική, romanized: dialektikḗ; German: Dialektik), also known as the dialectical method, refers originally to dialogue between people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric; the object is more an eventual and commonly-held truth than the 'winning' of an (often binary) competition. It has its origins in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages.

Hegelianism refigured "dialectic" to no longer refer to a literal dialogue. Instead, the term takes on the specialized meaning of development by way of overcoming internal contradictions. Dialectical materialism, a theory advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into a materialist theory of history. The legacy of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics has been criticized by philosophers, such as Karl Popper and Mario Bunge, who considered it unscientific.

A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a judicial panel. In an adversarial system, the judge hears all the witnesses and any other evidence presented by the barristers or solicitors of the case, assesses the credibility and arguments of the parties, and then issues a ruling in the case based on their interpretation of the law and their own personal judgment. A judge is expected to conduct the trial impartially and, typically, in an open court.

The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. In some jurisdictions, the judge's powers may be shared with a jury. In inquisitorial systems of criminal investigation, a judge might also be an examining magistrate. The presiding judge ensures that all court proceedings are lawful and orderly.

An essay (/ˈɛs.eɪ/, ESS-ay) is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.

Essays are commonly used as literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g., Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples.

Logical consequence (also entailment or logical implication) is a fundamental concept in logic which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically follows from one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises. The philosophical analysis of logical consequence involves the questions: In what sense does a conclusion follow from its premises? and What does it mean for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises? All of philosophical logic is meant to provide accounts of the nature of logical consequence and the nature of logical truth.

Logical consequence is necessary and formal, by way of examples that explain with formal proof and models of interpretation. A sentence is said to be a logical consequence of a set of sentences, for a given language, if and only if, using only logic (i.e., without regard to any personal interpretations of the sentences) the sentence must be true if every sentence in the set is true.

In logic, specifically in deductive reasoning, an argument is valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. It is not required for a valid argument to have premises that are actually true, but to have premises that, if they were true, would guarantee the truth of the argument's conclusion. Valid arguments must be clearly expressed by means of sentences called well-formed formulas (also called wffs or simply formulas).

The validity of an argument can be tested, proved or disproved, and depends on its logical form.

In logic, the logical form of a statement is a precisely specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguous logical interpretation with respect to a formal system. In an ideal formal language, the meaning of a logical form can be determined unambiguously from syntax alone. Logical forms are semantic, not syntactic constructs; therefore, there may be more than one string that represents the same logical form in a given language.

The logical form of an argument is called the argument form of the argument.

Logical reasoning is a mental activity that aims to arrive at a conclusion in a rigorous way. It happens in the form of inferences or arguments by starting from a set of premises and reasoning to a conclusion supported by these premises. The premises and the conclusion are propositions, i.e. true or false claims about what is the case. Together, they form an argument. Logical reasoning is norm-governed in the sense that it aims to formulate correct arguments that any rational person would find convincing. The main discipline studying logical reasoning is logic.

Distinct types of logical reasoning differ from each other concerning the norms they employ and the certainty of the conclusion they arrive at. Deductive reasoning offers the strongest support: the premises ensure the conclusion, meaning that it is impossible for the conclusion to be false if all the premises are true. Such an argument is called a valid argument, for example: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. For valid arguments, it is not important whether the premises are actually true but only that, if they were true, the conclusion could not be false. Valid arguments follow a rule of inference, such as modus ponens or modus tollens. Deductive reasoning plays a central role in formal logic and mathematics.

A premise or premiss is a proposition—a true or false declarative statement—used in an argument to prove the truth of another proposition called the conclusion. Arguments consist of a set of premises and a conclusion.

An argument is meaningful for its conclusion only when all of its premises are true. If one or more premises are false, the argument says nothing about whether the conclusion is true or false. For instance, a false premise on its own does not justify rejecting an argument's conclusion; to assume otherwise is a logical fallacy called denying the antecedent. One way to prove that a proposition is false is to formulate a sound argument with a conclusion that negates that proposition.

Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not necessarily due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but is due to its content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them. These misleading appearances are often connected to various aspects of natural language, such as ambiguous or vague expressions, or the assumption of implicit premises instead of making them explicit.

Traditionally, a great number of informal fallacies have been identified, including the fallacy of equivocation, the fallacy of amphiboly, the fallacies of composition and division, the false dilemma, the fallacy of begging the question, the ad hominem fallacy and the appeal to ignorance. There is no general agreement as to how the various fallacies are to be grouped into categories. One approach sometimes found in the literature is to distinguish between fallacies of ambiguity, which have their root in ambiguous or vague language, fallacies of presumption, which involve false or unjustified premises, and fallacies of relevance, in which the premises are not relevant to the conclusion despite appearances otherwise.

Critical thinking is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to make sound conclusions or informed choices. It involves recognizing underlying assumptions, providing justifications for ideas and actions, evaluating these justifications through comparisons with varying perspectives, and assessing their rationality and potential consequences. The goal of critical thinking is to form a judgment through the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation. In modern times, the use of the phrase critical thinking can be traced to John Dewey, who used the phrase reflective thinking, which depends on the knowledge base of an individual; the excellence of critical thinking in which an individual can engage varies according to it. According to philosopher Richard W. Paul, critical thinking and analysis are competencies that can be learned or trained. The application of critical thinking includes self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of the mind, as critical thinking is not a natural process; it must be induced, and ownership of the process must be taken for successful questioning and reasoning. Critical thinking presupposes a rigorous commitment to overcome egocentrism and sociocentrism, that leads to a mindful command of effective communication and problem solving.

Inventio, one of the five canons of rhetoric, is the method used for the discovery of arguments in Western rhetoric and comes from the Latin word, meaning "invention" or "discovery". Inventio is the central, indispensable canon of rhetoric, and traditionally means a systematic search for arguments.

Speakers use inventio when they begin the thought process of forming and developing an effective argument. Often, the invention phase can be seen as the first step in an attempt to generate ideas or create an argument that is convincing and compelling. The other four canons of classical rhetoric (namely dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio) rely on their interrelationship with invention.

A priori ('from the earlier') and a posteriori ('from the later') are Latin phrases used in philosophy & linguistics to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. A priori knowledge is independent of any experience. Examples include mathematics, tautologies and deduction from pure reason. A posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence. Examples include most fields of science and aspects of personal knowledge.

The terms originate from the analytic methods found in Organon, a collection of works by Aristotle. Prior analytics (a priori) is about deductive logic, which comes from definitions and first principles. Posterior analytics (a posteriori) is about inductive logic, which comes from observational evidence.