Philosophia Polymathematica

In the previous blog, by taking a comparative approach, we discussed how reasoning differs from rationalizing. When examining the structural components of reasoning, we, of course, considered cogent reasoning that would likely yield conclusions different from those yielded by rationalizing. Cogent reasoning is reasoning that is based on good reasons; it is based on objective measures such as facts, data, statistics, and evidence. Cogent reasoning is not based on arbitrary, capricious, or whimsical notions such as wishful thinking or rash appeals to emotion. During our immediately preceding comparative study, a natural question that suggested itself was whether rationalizing is the same thing as erroneous, as opposed to cogent, reasoning or, better yet, whether all erroneous reasoning is necessarily rationalizing. As we will explore in this blog, rationalizing and erroneous reasoning are also two altogether different modes of thought, albeit with a distinction much finer than the one