Reasoning in the sense of rationality is a consistency tool, and nothing more. Its job is to tell us that if we hold a and b, and if we also believe that logical contradiction necessarily implies falsehood, then we must hold c as a consequence. It is an intermediate processor, albeit a very valuable one. It cannot ground itself, at the ‘bottom’ end, or give meaning to its outcome at the ‘top’ end. At the bottom end it must rely on axioms assumed on the basis that they are intuitively true (the word ‘axiom’ comes from the Greek word axia, meaning ‘value’ – in other words, reason is founded on
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