Reason refers to a cause:. It commonly describes rational thinking (or the capacity for it); the cognitive faculties, collectively, of conception, judgment, deduction and intuition, something reasonable, in accordance with thought; justice, and ratio; proportion, which gives the term a broader and more practical sense than a single short definition would suggest. Depending on context, it can also point to to deduce or come to a conclusion by being rational, to perform a process of deduction or of induction, in order to convince or to confute; to argue, and to converse; to compare opinions, so the category can cover literal uses, related ideas, and more figurative extensions of the same core meaning. Taken together, these meanings present Reason as a flexible theme rather than a narrowly technical label, covering the central idea people usually mean when they use the word while still leaving room for closely related senses that appear in real language. Additional shades of meaning include to arrange and present the reasons for or against; to examine or discuss by arguments; to debate or discuss, to support with reasons, as a request, and to persuade by reasoning or argument, which reinforce how the category can stretch across adjacent but still recognizable uses of the same term.
