section_path: Reason compared to related concepts/Reason compared to logic
section_name: Reason compared to logic
paragraph_text: Reason compared to logic
  
  The terms logic or logical are sometimes used as if they were identical with reason or rational, or sometimes logic is seen as the most pure or the defining form of reason: "Logic is about reasoning—about going from premises to a conclusion.... When you do logic, you try to clarify reasoning and separate good from bad reasoning." In modern economics, rational choice is assumed to equate to logically consistent choice.
  
  However, reason and logic can be thought of as distinct—although logic is one important aspect of reason. Author Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach, characterizes the distinction in this way: Logic is done inside a system while reason is done outside the system by such methods as skipping steps, working backward, drawing diagrams, looking at examples, or seeing what happens if you change the rules of the system. Psychologists Mark H. Bickard and Robert L. Campbell argue that "rationality cannot be simply assimilated to logicality"; they note that "human knowledge of logic and logical systems has developed" over time through reasoning, and logical systems "can't construct new logical systems more powerful than themselves", so reasoning and rationality must involve more than a system of logic. Psychologist David Moshman, citing Bickhard and Campbell, argues for a " metacognitive conception of rationality" in which a person's development of reason "involves increasing consciousness and control of logical and other inferences".
  
  Reason is a type of thought, and logic involves the attempt to describe a system of formal rules or norms of appropriate reasoning. The oldest surviving writing to explicitly consider the rules by which reason operates are the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics. Although the Ancient Greeks had no separate word for logic as distinct from language and reason, Aristotle's newly coined word " syllogism " (syllogismos) identified logic clearly for the first time as a distinct field of study. When Aristotle referred to "the logical" (hē logikē), he was referring more broadly to rational thought.