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Case analysis is one of the most general and applicable methods of analytical thinking, depending only on the division of a problem, decision or situation into a sufficient number of separate cases. Analysing each such case individually may be enough to resolve the initial question. The principle of case analysis is invoked in the celebrated remark of Sherlock Holmes, to the effect that when one has eliminated the impossible, what remains must be true, however unlikely that seems. Sherlock Holmes as imagined by the seminal Holmesian artist, Sidney Edward Paget, in The Strand magazine. ...
The logical roots of the Holmes remark speak to the principle of excluded middle. That indicates the importance to case analysis of logical disjunction: stringing together propositions with the logical connective or. Medical diagnosis can indeed follow the Holmes pattern, with a patient's symptom possibly caused by a number of conditions: the patient suffers from A or B or ... or illness I. Deductive logic is applied to reducing the number of cases. The law of excluded middle (tertium non datur in Latin) states that for any proposition P, it is true that (P or ~P). ...
OR logic gate. ...
In formal logic, logical connectives, also known as logical connectors and sometimes logical constants, serve to connect statements into more complicated compound statements. ...
OR and/or or may stand for: Look up OR, Or, and or in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Deductive reasoning is the process of reaching a conclusion that is guaranteed to follow, if the evidence provided is true and the reasoning used to reach the conclusion is correct. ...
The most important issue in this style of case analysis is that the cases should be collectively exhaustive: everything is covered. The condition that they should be exclusive, while convenient, is not to be assumed lightly; for example a patient's liver problem might be caused by hepatitis and abuse of alcohol, with one factor not ruling out the other. This points up the distinction between exclusive or, and logical disjunction which is the default meaning of 'or' (in logic, mathematics and science) and which is non-exclusive. Case analysis of the non-overlapping kind is a special case, only. Hepatitis is a gastroenterological disease, featuring inflammation of the liver. ...
Exclusive disjunction (usual symbol xor) is a logical operator that results in true if one of the operands (not both) is true. ...
That being said, in computer programming, case analysis presents itself in a form best adapted to exclusive cases. In simple terms, the requirement is to have a list of actions, so that 'if X = 1 do P, if X = 2 do Q, if X = 3 do R' can be given as quite unambiguous instructions. The value of X here is computed according to what case one is in. HTML and JavaScript in an IDE that uses color coding to highlight various keywords and help the developer see the function of each piece of code. ...
Case-by-case analysis is a more specific term for such a pinning-down of cases. It assumes a situation in which a thorough-going case analysis can be completed: all cases covered and resolved. This is not always realistic. Other forms of case analysis are best case analysis and worst case analysis, scenarios for the optimist and pessimist, respectively.
Two names for approaches that take complete case-by-case analysis as not meeting the needs of the topic under consideration are casuistry, most often in ethics, and the case study method used in business schools. Casuistry (argument by cases) is an attempt to determine the correct response to a moral problem, often a moral dilemma, by drawing conclusions based on parallels with agreed responses to pure cases, also called paradigms. ...
Ethics (from Greek ἦθος meaning custom) is the branch of axiology, one of the four major branches of philosophy, which attempts to understand the nature of morality; to distinguish that which is right from that which is wrong. ...
Case studies involve a particular method of research. ...
See also
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