REASONING

learning that he "had been talking prose for forty years without knowing it." As Jevons William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) was an influential English logician and economist. says in mentioning this: "Ninety-nine people out of a hundred might be equally surprised on hearing that they had been converting propositions converting propositionsIn logic, "conversion" is a process of reversing the subject and predicate of a statement (e.g., changing "No circles are squares" to "No squares are circles")., syllogizing syllogizingReasoning through a syllogism, which is a formal argument consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion (e.g., All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal)., falling into paralogisms paralogismsA paralogism is a piece of illogical or faulty reasoning, typically one that the speaker is not aware is flawed., framing hypotheses, and making classifications with genera and species genera and speciesThese are Latin terms for "groups" and "kinds" used to categorize things from broad to specific.. If asked whether they were logicians, they would probably answer, 'No!' They would be partly right; for I believe that a large number even of educated persons have no clear idea of what logic is. Yet, in a certain way, everyone must have been a logician since he began to speak."

So, in asking you to consider the processes of reasoning, we are not assuming that you have never reasoned—on the contrary, we are fully aware that you, like every other person, have reasoned all your mature life. That is not the question. While everyone reasons, it is equally true that the majority of people reason incorrectly. Many people reason along lines that are far from correct and scientific, and they suffer as a result. Some writers have claimed that the majority of people are incapable of even fairly correct