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Deductive reasoning is the psychological process of drawing deductive inferences.An inference is a set of premises together with a conclusion. This psychological process starts from the premises and reasons to a conclusion based on and supported by these premises.
Non-deductive reasoning plays a central role in everyday life and in most sciences. Often-discussed types are inductive , abductive , and analogical reasoning . Inductive reasoning is a form of generalization that infers a universal law from a pattern found in many individual cases.
For example, the argument, "All young girls wear skirts; Julie is a young girl; therefore, Julie wears skirts" is valid logically, but is not sound because the first premise isn't true. The syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning in which two statements reach a logical conclusion. With this reasoning, one statement could be "Every A is B ...
Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. [1] It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans.
Deductive inference is monotonic: if a conclusion is reached on the basis of a certain set of premises, then that conclusion still holds if more premises are added. By contrast, everyday reasoning is mostly non-monotonic because it involves risk: we jump to conclusions from deductively insufficient premises.
Other forms of reasoning are sometimes also taken to be part of logic, such as inductive reasoning and abductive reasoning, which are forms of reasoning that are not purely deductive, but include material inference. Similarly, it is important to distinguish deductive validity and inductive validity (called "strength").
A syllogism (Ancient Greek: συλλογισμός, syllogismos, 'conclusion, inference') is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true.
Each one has a name (for example, argument from effect to cause) and presents a type of connection between premises and a conclusion in an argument, and this connection is expressed as a rule of inference. Argumentation schemes can include inferences based on different types of reasoning—deductive, inductive, abductive, probabilistic, etc.