Reasoning Systems as Structured Processes: Foundations, Failures, and Formal Criteria
This work provides a foundational structure for representing and comparing reasoning systems, which is incremental as it builds on existing concepts without proposing new solutions.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing reasoning systems by proposing a general formal framework that models them as structured tuples, accommodating logical, algorithmic, and learning-based processes, and it surveys internal criteria and failure modes to support future investigations.
This paper outlines a general formal framework for reasoning systems, intended to support future analysis of inference architectures across domains. We model reasoning systems as structured tuples comprising phenomena, explanation space, inference and generation maps, and a principle base. The formulation accommodates logical, algorithmic, and learning-based reasoning processes within a unified structural schema, while remaining agnostic to any specific reasoning algorithm or logic system. We survey basic internal criteria--including coherence, soundness, and completeness-and catalog typical failure modes such as contradiction, incompleteness, and non-convergence. The framework also admits dynamic behaviors like iterative refinement and principle evolution. The goal of this work is to establish a foundational structure for representing and comparing reasoning systems, particularly in contexts where internal failure, adaptation, or fragmentation may arise. No specific solution architecture is proposed; instead, we aim to support future theoretical and practical investigations into reasoning under structural constraint.