In the thinking methodology, the Pre-Qin philosophers advocated dialectics, which comprised chiefly thinking along the liner of wholeness, changing, reciprocity and golden mean.
The Confucian scholars , and the philosophers of the Laoist doctrine , the logician doctrine and the yin-yang doctrine in the Pre-Qin period , all stressed thinking on the basis of wholeness . They regarded the universe as a whole, and so are humans and all things. They all stressed that to understand a part, it was necessary to understand the whole.
All the schools of the Pre-Qin philosophies held that everything in the universe was changing. Nature and society both were in the course of changing. Standing on the side of a river, Confucius exclaimed, “Things go past like this, never mind day or night”! Master Lao said, “Nature can not persist. How can humans persist?”
They explained the source and the law of changing with the viewpoint of reciprocity. The reciprocity viewpoint considered that all things had two contradictory aspects, which were mutually dependent and mutually transformable. “Fortune lies within mishap; mishap lies within fortune”, “Things may be benefited through damaging or be damaged through benefiting”. The two maxims both meant that there were two contradictory aspects to a thing which were mutually dependent, permeating and transforming. In the “Book of Art of War of Master Sun”, many such viewpoint can also be found: Order and disturbance, courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, many and few, security and disruption were all pairs of contradictions. These contradictions were not always stable and unchangeable, but were mutually transformable under certain condition. Master Sun said, “Know both your opponents and yourself, you will not lose in battles”. It meant that only through a full knowledge of the true facts of both the opponent and oneself cans one stand in an invincible position. 
Confucius commended that the golden mean was the highest virtue. He said, “As a virtue , the golden mean is the highest , but for a long time it has been rarely practiced by the people”.( from “Confucian Analects : Young” ) Also , Confucius considered the golden mean as a method of thinking . He stressed “applying the golden mean in actions”, “golden mean and constancy” and “golden mean and adherence”. He asked people to adopt the suitable, golden mean standard method to do things according to the concrete conditions.
