REASONING IN ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
The objective of scholarly reasoning is to justify new knowledge in a scientific field. Conspicuously
missing from the extant literature is a methodological—as op posed to rhetorical, psychological, or
social—account of scientific reasoning. The missing piece is crucial, because the general understanding
of how scientists’ reason and formulate explanations is surprisingly limited, and yet prescriptive norms
are essential in defining criteria for methodological rigor. The paucity (read; lack) of the methodological
literature on reasoning in organization science in particular is striking, because questions regarding the
nature of human reasoning have always been at the heart of organization scholarship.
In stark contrast, methodological texts implicitly assume that researchers are rational actors who are
able to overcome cognitive limitations through rigorous application of scientific reasoning principles.
WHAT IS SOUND REASONING?
Forms of Reasoning: Deduction, Induction, and Abduction
1. All the beans in this bag are white (this is the “rule”)
2. These beans are form this bag (the “explanation”)
3. These beans are white (the “observation”)
Deductive reasoning takes the rule (1) and the explanation (2) as premises and derives the observation
(3). In deduction, one draws a conclusion about the particular based on the general.
Inductive reasoning combines the observation (3) and the explanation (2) to infer the rule (1) and, thus,
moves from the particular to the general.
Conventionally, deduction and induction have been considered the two basic forms of scientific
reasoning. There is, however, a third form that merits attention: abduction. In abduction, one begins
with the rule (1) and the observation (3); the explanation (2) is inferred if it accounts for the observation
in light of the rule. Given the observation of white beans and the general rule that all the beans in the
bag are white as well, one may reasonably infer that the beans came from that specific bag.
The three forms of reasoning constitute our primary tools of inference. In the general sense, deduction
is an inference to a particular observation (or case), induction an inference to a generalization, and
abduction an inference to an explanation. In summary, we predict, confirm, and disconfirm through
deduction, generalize through induction, and theorize through abduction.
Reasoning-As-Computation and Reasoning-As-Cognition
One of the essential qualities of eliminative induction is researcher invariance: because the common
properties and their relationships are assumed to be essentially embedded in the data, any researcher
looking at the same data will, by assumption, reason similarly and discover the same generalization.
Consequently, inductive generalizations can indeed be claimed "to emerge" from the data. The view of
reasoning underlying eliminative induction is computation, a researcher-invariant activity that bridges
the premises with the conclusions. Computation here is not limited to mathematical operations with
quantitative da ta: it means, in a general sense, following explicit, logically coherent rules. While it can
be performed by the cognitive mind, cognition per se has only a perfunctory role, and, consequently,
reasoning can be "abstracted from the mind" and programmed into algorithms.
