21 Facts About Deductive reasoning

Deductive reasoning is the mental process of drawing deductive inferences.

Mental logic theories hold that deductive reasoning is a language-like process that happens through the manipulation of representations using rules of inference.

Mental model theories, on the other hand, claim that deductive reasoning involves models of possible states of the world without the medium of language or rules of inference.

Deductive reasoning is the psychological process of drawing deductive inferences.

Deductive reasoning is studied in logic, psychology, and the cognitive sciences.

The psychological study of deductive reasoning is concerned with how good people are at drawing deductive inferences and with the factors determining their performance.

Deductive reasoning inferences are found both in natural language and in formal logical systems, such as propositional logic.

Deductive reasoning arguments differ from non-deductive arguments in that the truth of their premises ensures the truth of their conclusion.

Deductive reasoning arguments are evaluated in terms of their validity and soundness.

Deductive reasoning can be contrasted with inductive reasoning, in regards to validity and soundness.

Deductive reasoning is usually contrasted with non-deductive or ampliative reasoning.

Sometimes the term "inductive Deductive reasoning" is used in a very wide sense to cover all forms of ampliative Deductive reasoning.

An example of ampliative Deductive reasoning is the inference from the premise "every raven in a random sample of 3200 ravens is black" to the conclusion "all ravens are black": the extensive random sample makes the conclusion very likely, but it does not exclude that there are rare exceptions.

Ampliative Deductive reasoning is very common in everyday discourse and the sciences.

An important drawback of deductive reasoning is that it does not lead to genuinely new information.

One difficulty for this characterization is that it makes deductive reasoning appear useless: if deduction is uninformative, it is not clear why people would engage in it and study it.

On this view, deductive reasoning is uninformative on the depth level, in contrast to ampliative reasoning.

Mental model theories, on the other hand, hold that deductive reasoning involves models or mental representations of possible states of the world without the medium of language or rules of inference.

Ability of deductive reasoning is an important aspect of intelligence and many tests of intelligence include problems that call for deductive inferences.

Deductive reasoning inferences are able to transfer the justification of the premises onto the conclusion.

Deductive reasoning is central to this endeavor because of its necessarily truth-preserving nature.