ratiocination

noun

1. (uncountable, usually)Reasoning, conscious deliberate inference; the activity or process of reasoning.

   “But it will be apparent from the refutation of the ſecond Falſification, wherewith you charge the Author of the Letters, that theſe miſchievous conſequences are rightly drawn from the wicked principle layd down by Vaſquez [Gabriel Vásquez] in the ſame place, and accordingly, that that Jeſuit hath not done violence to the rules of ratiocination, but to thoſe of the Goſpel.”

   “He'd run in Debt by Diſputation, / And pay with Ratiocination. / All this by Syllogiſm, true / In Mood and Figure, he wou'd do.”

   “It is hard to follow the kinks of woman suffrage ratiocination.”

   “As the requirements of mass democracy forced the gentleman intellectual from the political scene, the new style political leaders felt the need to flatter the electorate by stressing the superiority of inborn, natural, intuitive and folkish wisdom and to devaluate the ratiocinations of the cultivated.”

2. (uncountable, usually)Thought or reasoning that is exact, valid and rational.
3. (uncountable, usually)A proposition arrived at by such thought.

   “Where the Qur’an has not been explicit, the Hadith has often supplied guidance, providing an intermediate source of knowledge between the text of the Holy Book itself and the ratiocinations of the religious lawyers, the fuqaha’, who had recourse, when all else failed, to such principles as analogical reasoning and personal judgement.”