Reasoning Systems as Structured Processes: Foundations, Failures, and Formal Criteria

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal framework for reasoning systems as structured processes, enabling analysis and comparison of inference architectures across domains, accommodating various reasoning types and failure modes.

Contribution

It introduces a unified structural schema for reasoning systems, encompassing phenomena, explanation, inference, and principles, supporting analysis of their behavior and failures.

Findings

Framework models logical, algorithmic, and learning-based reasoning.

Catalogs typical failure modes like contradiction and non-convergence.

Supports dynamic behaviors such as iterative refinement.

Abstract

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.