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Reasoning concepts
From Chains of Reason
This section provides introductory articles on the key concepts in reasoning.
Basic reasoning concepts
- Arguments, premises and conclusions
- Deduction
- Induction
- Validity and soundness
- Invalidity
- Consistency
- Fallacies
- Refutation
- Axioms
- Definitions
- Certainty and probability
- Tautologies, self-contradictions and the law of non-contradiction
Further reasoning concepts
- Abduction
- Hypothetico-deductive method
- Dialectic
- Analogies
- Anomalies and exceptions that prove the rule
- Intuition pumps
- Logical constructions
- Reduction
- Thought experiments
- Transcendental arguments
- Useful fictions
Concepts for assessing reasoning
- Alternative explanations
- Ambiguity
- Analogy, argument by
- Bivalence and the excluded middle
- Category mistakes
- Ceteris paribus
- Circularity
- Conceptual incoherence
- Counterexamples
- Criteria
- Error theory
- False dichotomy
- Genetic fallacy
- Horned dilemmas
- Hume's Fork
- Is/ought gap
- Leibniz's law of identity
- Masked man fallacy
- Ockham's razor
- Paradoxes
- Partners in guilt
- Principle of charity
- Question-begging
- Proof by contradiction
- Redundancy
- Regresses
- Saving the phenomena
- Self-defeating arguments
- Sufficient reason
- Testability
