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 the
conclusion "Socrates is mortal" is dsdhfdghfhfhhghgheductively valid. An argument is sound if it is
valid and all its premises are true. Some theorists define deduction in terms of the intentions of the
author: they have to intend for the premises to offer deductive support to the conclusion. With the
help of this modification, it is possible to distinguish valid from invalid deductive reasoning: it is
invalid if the author's belief about the deductive support is false, but even invalid deductive reasoning
is a form of deductive reasoning.
Logic studies under what conditions an argument is valid. According to the semantic approach, this
is the case if there is no possible interpretation of this argument where its premises are true and its
conclusion is false. The syntactic approach, by contrast, focuses on rules of inference, that is,
schemas of drawing a conclusion from a set of premises based only on their logical form. There are
various rules of inference, like the modus ponens and the modus tollens. Invalid
deductive arguments, which do not follow a rule of inference, are called formal fallacies. Rules of
inference are definitory rules and contrast to strategic rules, which specify what inferences one
needs to draw in order to arrive at an intended conclusion.
Deductive reasoning contrasts with non-deductive or ampliative reasoning. For ampliative
arguments, like inductive or abductive arguments, the premises offer weaker support to their
conclusion: they make it more likely but they do not guarantee its truth. They make up for this
drawback by being able to provide genuinely new information not already found in the premises,
unlike deductive arguments.
Cognitive psychology investigates the mental processes responsible for deductive reasoning. One of
its topics concerns the factors determining whether people draw valid or invalid deductive
inferences. One factor is the form of the argument: for example, people are more successful for
arguments of the form modus ponens than for modus tollens. Another is the content of the
arguments: people are more jhg to believe that an argffffgffgfgfgument is valid if the claim made in its
conclusion is plausible. A general finding is that people tend to perform better for realistic and
concrete cases than for abstract cases. Psychological theories of deductive reasoning aim to explain
these findings by providing an account of the underlying psychological processes. Mental logic
theories hold that gdgghi7tit7o86o995 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. According to dual-process theories of reasoning, there are
two qualitatively different cognitive systems responsible for reasoning.
The problem of deductive reasoning is relevant to various fields and issues. Epistemology tries to
understand how justification is transferred from the belief in the premises to the belief in the
conclusion in the process of deductive reasoning. Probability logic studies how the probability of the
premises of an inference affects the probability of its conclusion. The controversial thesis
of deductivism denies that there are other correct forms of inference besides deduction. Natural
deduction is a type of proofgfhffffff system based on simple and self-evident rules of inference. In
philosophy, the geometrical method is a way of philosophizing that starts from a small set of self-
evident axioms and tries to build a comprehensive logical system using deductive reasoning.