ratiocination

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"Yes, Uncle Reub '; ratiocination is a good word in its place."

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Definitions (6)

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  1. The mental process of passing from the cognition of premises to the cognition of the conclusion; reasoning. Most writers make ratiocination synonymous with reasoning. J. S. Mill and others hold that the word is usually limited to necessary reasoning. The Latin word is especially applied by Cicero to probable reasoning. The great instrument that this work [spiritual meditation] is done by is ratiocination, reasoning the case with yourselves, discourse of mind, cogitation, or thinking; or, if you will, call it consideration. Baxter, Saints' Rest, iv. 8. The schoolmen make a third act of the mind, which they call ratiocination, and we may stile it the generation of a judgement from others actually in our understanding. A. Tucker, Light of Nature, I. i. 11. Ratiocination is the great principle of order in thinking; it reduces a chaos into harmony; it catalogues the accumulations of knowledge; it maps out for us the relations of its separate departments; it puts us in the way to correct its own mistakes. J. H. Newman, Gram. of Assent, p. 273.
  2. A mental product and object consisting of premises and a conclusion drawn from them; inference; an argumentation. Can any kind of ratiocination allow Christ all the marks of the Messiah, and yet deny him to be the Messiah? South. Ratiocination denotes properly the process, but, improperly, also the product of reasoning. Sir W. Hamilton, Logic, xv.
  3. Synonyms Reasoning, etc. See inference.

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Examples (50)

  • The higher intellectual powers of man, such as those of ratiocination, abstraction, self consciousness, etc., probably follow from the continued improvement and exercise of the other mental faculties
  • And it is worth attention that when Clifford is aroused to sudden action by Judge Pyncheon's death, the coruscating play of his intellect is almost precisely that brilliant but defective kind of ratiocination which Poe so delights to display. —  A Study Of Hawthorne
  • Is ratiocination, then, not a process of inference? —  Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV.
  • Arthur Symons, in his `Introduction to the Study of Browning', remarks it is as a piece of ratiocination--suffused, indeed, with imagination-- that the poem seems to have its raison d'etre. —  An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry
  • Where were Mr Atherstone's powers of ratiocination, and all his acoustics? —  Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2
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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

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  1. from French ratiocination =Provencal raciocinacio =Spanish raciocinacion =Portuguese raciocinação (cf. Italian raziocinamento, raziocinio, reasoning), from Latin ratiocinatio (n-), reasoning, argumentation, a syllogism, from ratiocinari, past participle ratiocinatus, reason: see ratiocinate.
 

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