The Importance Of Reason In The Pursuit Of Knowledge

Reason plays a very important role throughout the lives of humans; reason is very heavily involved in humans discovering new knowledge. Humans always have a reason for carrying out an action or behaving in a particular way by rationalizing the cause and effect of it. Reason is defined as to consciously understand everything using logic in many different areas of knowledge, it is to explain and justify a certain action (Dictionary.com). People use reason to create or deduce if a knowledge claim is true or false. Reason is also used to change or rationalize habits, institutions and thinking, all which relies on supporting evidences (Academic Room). Throughout history, people have used more than just reason to discover new knowledge, and therefore we cannot trust only reason alone in pursuit

This essay would further discuss and explain the rationale to why we cannot trust reason in the pursuit of knowledge especially in two areas of knowledge, which are natural sciences and ethics.

There are two general types of reasoning; they are deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is where its conclusion, normally believed to be absolutely true, is logically derived from a particular group of evidences within the system (Dictionary.com). Inductive reasoning is where its conclusion, which has a possibility of being true, is logically derived from a set of observations that are found true most of the time (WhatIs.com).

Reason plays a very vital and important role in the area of natural sciences. Knowledge claims made in natural sciences compared to other areas since they have solid evidence to back the knowledge claims made. The sciences use both deductive and inductive reasoning though they use more of inductive reasoning, where knowledge claims made are based on repetitive past observations. The scientific method requires one to have a set of observations, using inductive reasoning to