RATIOCINATION (Lat. rat ioeinatio, from ratiocinari, to reason, from ratio, reckoning, re lation, reason), or REASONING. Reasoning, in psychology, i-s a successive association of judg ments. Snppose that a complex of ideas (say, the look of a cloudy sky) is presented to con sciousness. The attention plays upon this com plex, and in obedience to some one of its various conditions (see ATTENTION) fixes upon some one of the constituent ideas. This idea is therefore drawn out of the mass, and rendered more promi nent; at the same time, it becomes liable to asso ciative supplementing. The complex of ideas is then reconstituted; we have what is technically known as an 'association after disjunction.' When this association takes place in verbal terms, we call the resulting complex a judgment. Thus, to work out the instance taken: I look at the sky, and say, "It is going to rain!" Certain of the visual ideas have attracted my attention; they have been drawn out from the general mass of visual ideas present in consciousness, and have been supplemented by the idea of rain. The whole situation has then been put together again; there has been a reassociation after the disjunc tion; and the prominent idea in the reconstituted consciousness is the idea of rain. The association takes a verbal form; the promise of rain is 'pred icated' of the total look of the sky, so that we describe it as a judgment.
In saying, then, that reasoning is a successive association of judgments, we are saying, first, that it is an extremely complicated process. FT.
the judgments that are successively associated are themselves the products of association after disjunction. In the instance given, the disjunc tion may well have been the work of the passive attention; in the typical judgment of logic, the work of an active attention is presupposed, and the whole process thus becomes, on its psychologi cal side, much more complicated than we have represented it to be. As, however, the further complication is a matter not of kind, but simply of degree, we need not go into it in detail.
Again, in defining reasoning as we have defined it, we are saying, secondly, that it is a process that must have appeared relatively late in the history of mind. For the ideas in terms of which the constituent judgments are couched are sym bolic (verbal) ideas, not reproductions or pic torial ideas; and a long mental history separates the reproductive from the symbolic idea. The reproductive counterpart of reasoning is to be found in the constructions of the creative or ac tive imagination. See IMAGINATION.
Consult: James, Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890) ; Titchener. outline of Psychol ogy (ib., 1899) Ladd, Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory (ib., 1894) ; Mundt. Physiolo gische 1vsyeholadic (Leipzig, 1893). For reason ing as a logical process, see DEDUCTION ; INDUC TION ; SYLLOGISM.