Will and Reasoning

A stream of utterances can be more or less coherent. In some cases, coherence is a function of the meanings of a sequence of utterances, but in other cases, e. g. rhyming, it is not. 'Reasoning' can be defined as a sequence of utterances the coherence of which is determined by certain rules governing sequences of utterances. Now, uttering is a mode of Motility, and, therefore, of Will. Hence, Reasoning can be defined as a characteristic of Will. Of course, an influential tradition argues that the rules of Reasoning are independent of utterances, and, likewise, that Reason exists even where there are no utterances. Instead, according to that tradition, Reasoning is a process of unpacking what already implicitly exists, with respect to which a novel utterance is extrinsic. However, that interpretation leaves unexamined the meaning of 'implicit', likely because it recognizes the difficulty in proving, without making it explicit, that something implicitly exists. In other words, that interpretation has difficulty denying that even 'pure' Reasoning does not consist in the issuance of a new proposition. Until it surmounts that difficulty, that interpretation remains vulnerable to the counter-thesis that Reasoning is primarily the process of generating new utterances, i. e. is fundamentally a characteristic of Will.