Position: Beyond Reasoning Zombies — AI Reasoning Requires Process Validity

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, verifiable automated reasoning, and symbolic methods in general. This position contends that definitional ambiguity leaves the construct validity of reasoning evaluation unverifiable, and undermines quantifiable progress toward the collective goal of trustworthy autonomous reasoning. We also contend that this ambiguity is addressable. To that end, we provide (1) general and extensible definitions for valid and sound reasoning based on a synthesis of the literature, which can serve as an accessible reference and a starting point for community discussion; and (2) a checklist for best practices in the communication of AI reasoning research.