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Logical reasoning is concerned with the correctness of arguments. A key distinction is between deductive and non-deductive arguments. Logical reasoning is a mental activity that aims to arrive at a conclusion in a rigorous way. It happens in the form of inferences or arguments by starting from a set of premises and reasoning to a conclusion ...
Deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is the process of drawing valid inferences. An inference is valid if its conclusion follows logically from its premises, meaning that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. For example, the inference from the premises "all men are mortal" and " Socrates is a man" to ...
Transformation rules. In logic and the philosophy of logic, specifically in deductive reasoning, a rule of inference, inference rule or transformation rule is a logical form consisting of a function which takes premises, analyzes their syntax, and returns a conclusion (or conclusions). For example, the rule of inference called modus ponens ...
Syllogism. A syllogism (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. "Socrates" at the Louvre. In its earliest form (defined by Aristotle in his 350 BC book Prior ...
Rules of inference are syntactical transform rules which one can use to infer a conclusion from a premise to create an argument. A set of rules can be used to infer any valid conclusion if it is complete, while never inferring an invalid conclusion, if it is sound. A sound and complete set of rules need not include every rule in the following ...
A Mastermind player uses abduction to infer the secret colors (top) from summaries (bottom left) of discrepancies in their guesses (bottom right). Abductive reasoning (also called abduction, [1] abductive inference, [1] or retroduction[2]) is a form of logical inference that seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from a set of observations.
Contraposition. In logic and mathematics, contraposition, or transposition, refers to the inference of going from a conditional statement into its logically equivalent contrapositive, and an associated proof method known as § Proof by contrapositive. The contrapositive of a statement has its antecedent and consequent inverted and flipped.
The argument may use other previously established statements, such as theorems; but every proof can, in principle, be constructed using only certain basic or original assumptions known as axioms, [2] [3] [4] along with the accepted rules of inference. Proofs are examples of exhaustive deductive reasoning which establish logical certainty, to be ...