Types of reasoning

Disciplines > Argument > Types of reasoning

Reasoning within an argument gives the rationale behind why one choice, for example should be selected over another. Types of reasoning include:

• Abduction: the process of creating explanatory hypotheses.
• Analogical reasoning: relating things to novel other situations.
• Cause-and-effect reasoning: showing causes and resulting effect.
  • Cause-to-effects reasoning: starting from the cause and going forward.
  • Effects-to-cause reasoning: starting from the effect and working backward.
• Comparative reasoning: comparing one thing against another.
• Conditional reasoning: using if...then...
• Criteria reasoning: comparing against established criteria.
• Decompositional reasoning: understand the parts to understand the whole.
• Deductive reasoning: starting from the general rule and moving to specifics.
• Inductive reasoning: starting from specifics and deriving a general rule.
• Modal logic: arguing about necessity and possibility.
• Traditional logic: assuming premises are correct.
• Pros-vs-cons reasoning: using arguments both for and against a case.
• Set-based reasoning: based on categories and membership relationships.
• Systemic reasoning: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Syllogistic reasoning: drawing conclusions from premises.

Note that these are not all mutually exclusive methods and several give different lenses onto overlapping areas. In classical argument, for example, all arguments are framed as either inductive or deductive.

See also

Fallacies, Syllogisms