{
  "id": "reason.causal",
  "term": "reason",
  "sense": "causal",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 10,
  "arena": "common",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a cause for a meaning of why something happens",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "cause.reason",
      "meaning.significance",
      "happen.event-occurrence",
      "mean.signify"
    ],
    "interaction": "the cause and the meaning interact through the event to signify why a change occurs",
    "novel_properties": [
      "causal significance",
      "explanatory role",
      "why-reference"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The 2003 Northeast Blackout spread because a single Ohio relay failed, triggering cascading grid failures across eight U.S. states.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "The extinction of the passenger pigeon followed habitat loss and industrial-scale hunting in late 19th-century North America.",
      "domain": "biology"
    },
    {
      "text": "Bitcoin transactions are verified because miners solve cryptographic puzzles, creating blocks every ten minutes on average.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "cause.reason",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "reason is a kind of cause"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "reason",
    "reasoned",
    "reasoning",
    "reasons"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added 'happen.event-occurrence' and 'mean.signify' to components to align with definition's reliance on occurrence and signification."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-reason.causal"
}