Position: Reasoning is a Learnable Rule-Based Process
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This position paper argues that "reasoning" in LLM research lacks any operational definition, which makes reasoning benchmarks fundamentally unverifiable—you can't trust that a model scoring well on a "reasoning" eval is actually reasoning rather than pattern-matching. It proposes defining valid/sound reasoning as a learnable rule-based process plus a reporting checklist, which is a signal to stop treating reasoning-benchmark deltas as ground truth and to demand explicit definitions of what your evals actually measure before you gate deployment decisions on them.
Researchers now define valid and sound reasoning as a learnable rule-based process, providing operational definitions and a checklist for best practices; this clarity enables LLM and agent developers to verify and quantify progress toward trustworthy autonomous reasoning, directly impacting the reliability of production systems.