Word family noun reason reasoning reasonableness adjective reasonable ≠ unreasonable reasoned verb reason adverb reasonably ≠ unreasonably
From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishreasoningrea‧son‧ing /ˈriːzənɪŋ/ ●○○ noun [uncountable] LOGICALa process of thinking carefully about something in order to make a judgmentscientific/logical/legal reasoningreasoning behind What is the reasoning behind this decision?Examples from the Corpus
reasoning• Although I understood her reasoning, I did not agree with her decision.• logical reasoning• I found it hard to follow his line of reasoning.• The logic of this line of reasoning led to a consideration of land nationalisation.• This excellent piece of reasoning then went into their future operational role.• The architect was asked to explain the reasoning behind his new design.• There appear to be several major faults in the reasoning that animal decline was the result of such plant disappearances.• But I regret I can not agree with some of the reasoning in the judgments.• The approach also works well when alternatives can be considered and rejected through reasoning and facts.• These cases illustrate well that treaty reasoning is not dominant in third party situations where there are displacing factors.scientific/logical/legal reasoning• The exaltation of emotion and intuition above logical reasoning can readily disentangle them from any such disciplinary anchorage.• One of the characteristics of scientific reasoning is the ability to think about a number of variables at the same time.• At the level of legal reasoning these developments can not be accommodated within the traditional contractual conception of the company.• The underlying approach of codification in re-forming the law has stressed the mechanistic nature of legal reasoning as essentially a syllogistic exercise.• The argument just concluded studied legal reasoning in cross-section, the details of controversy case by case.• I wish only to have made it sufficiently clear that scientific reasoning is a chimera.• Formal operational schemes, such as proportion and probability, bear a closer likeness to scientific reasoning.• This qualified chimera image will allow our comparison of Presocratic reasoning with scientific reasoning to be more precise. 