Position: Reasoning is a Learnable Rule-Based Process

A new position paper on arXiv (2608.12325v1) argues that the AI community's lack of clear operational definitions for reasoning undermines the verifiability of reasoning evaluations and progress toward trustworthy autonomous reasoning. The authors propose defining valid and sound reasoning as a learnable rule-based process and provide a checklist for best practices in communicating AI reasoning research.

arXiv:2608.12325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous reasoning is among the most scientifically and economically motivating topics in AI today. Historically the purview of symbolic AI, recent advances have mainly emerged from deep probabilistic generative models. Despite immense interest and rapid progress, the generative AI community has not clearly converged on operational definitions for reasoning and often implicitly rejects the historical treatment of this topic in logic and verifiable automated reasoning. This position contends that definitional ambiguity leaves the construct validity of reasoning evaluation unverifiable, undermining quantifiable progress toward trustworthy autonomous reasoning. We also contend that this ambiguity is addressable. To that end, we provide 1 operational definitions based on a synthesis of the literature, positioning valid and sound reasoning as a learnable rule-based process; and 2 a checklist for best practices in the communication of AI reasoning research.