Types of Reasoning

1.       Reasoning by analogy is when you reason from one particular to another. An example of this would be:

Premise 1: Paco is a dog and eats dog food.

Premise 2: Sam is a dog.

Conclusion: Sam eats dog food.

2.       Argument by sign occurs when you have two things that are often closely related, we can assume that the presence or lack of one indicates the presence or lack of the other. For example people often associate smoke with fire or a person’s SAT score with how smart that person is.

3.       Casual reasoning allows people to find meaningful order in events that might otherwise appear random. For example, there is a knock on the door and the cat runs into the other room. A lady sitting on the couch gets up to answer it and a vase falls off a nearby table and breaks. Casual reasoning allows us to analyze the causation of events that lead to the broken vase and give us reason to what happened. In this situation we would reason that the jumpy cat knocked the table and it ran out of the room.

4.       Criteria reasoning is useful when trying to reason with others because it offers criteria from the start that helps make your argument more likely to be accepted. Establishing criteria provides legitimacy for any future argument

5.       Reasoning by example involves using examples as evidence to why someone should do something or something should occur. For example, “You shouldn’t buy that shirt. My Sister bought that shirt and the buttons fell off the first time she wore it.”

6.       In inductive reasoning the conclusion contains more information than is already contained in the premises. For example:

7.       Premise: Christmas has been on December 25^th for each year up until now.

Conclusion: Christmas will be on December 25^th of this year as well.

8.       In deductive reasoning there is no way for the premises to be true and the conclusion false, the conclusion contains no more information than in the premises.

Premise 1: If we get tickets, I will go to the concert

Premise 2: I am going to the concert.

Conclusion: We got the tickets.