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Archive Record · Wisdom Topic

Reasoning

An introduction to reasoning as the human capacity for drawing conclusions — deduction, induction, and abduction — from Aristotle's syllogism through Hume's problem of induction to modern theories of inference.

Reasoning is the human capacity to move from what we know to what we can infer — to draw conclusions from premises, generalize from evidence, and generate explanations. Philosophy divides reasoning into three great forms: deduction, which guarantees its conclusions; induction, which supports them with probability; and abduction, which proposes explanations to be tested.

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