ABSTRACT
Informal or everyday reasoning provides one of our most important intellectual resources for coping with the world. In business, political, academic, or personal decisions, we have to examine the factors impinging on a situation, forecast the outcomes of possible courses of action, evaluate those outcomes and weigh them relative to one another, and try to choose so as to maximize positive outcomes and minimize negative ones. Nor is the pragmatic context of decision making the only one in which informal reasoning has importance. The beliefs we hold, and consequently the inferences we later make and attitudes we later assume, depend in part on our informal reasoning about the grounds for those beliefs. Accepting beliefs wisely serves the ultimate end of later sound conduct as well as the more immediate end of sound belief itself.
