The Ladder of Inference

Your narratives create a persuasive argument based on various, intertwined data, multiple measures, and dimensions. Two failure modes often appear when undertaking this kind of task:  letting your reader get lost among the weeds of details, and summarizing at such a high level that the reader never gets a substantive feel for the terrain covered. Thinking consciously about the Ladder of Inference can help us navigate gracefully from high-level generalizations down to supporting data and from detailed specifics up to summarizing abstractions that pack a punch.

A framework developed by Chris Argyris, the Ladder of Inference describes how we infer meaning and craft judgments from what we observe or hear. Argyris offered the ladder as a tool to help people slow down their thinking and so make unproductive conversations more helpful. (We draw our inferences so automatically and so fast that we often have trouble distinguishing between what we see and what we think and feel about what we see.)

The Ladder of Inference offers a great check on our writing, too. Have we included enough directly observable data to ground the argument? Have we offered normalizing context for those data, particularly for readers unfamiliar with our research field or teaching domain? Have we named the information in terms relevant to the criteria or standards we’re addressing?  Do we complete the argument by explicitly articulating the judgment, such as “The above evidence demonstrates that I meet or exceed the standard of effectiveness for the teaching”?