Deductive reasoning Deductive reasoning Deductive reasoning, also deductive logic, logical deduction is the process of reasoning from one or more statements (premises) to reach a logically certain conclusion. Deductive reasoning goes in the same direction as that of the conditionals, and links premises with conclusions. If all premises are true, the terms are clear, and the rules of deductive logic are followed, then the conclusion reached is necessarily true. Deductive reasoning (""top-down logic"") contrasts with inductive reasoning (""bottom-up logic"") in the following way; in deductive reasoning, a conclusion is reached reductively by applying general rules which hold over the entirety of a
Is Logic Empirical? in just the same way as he argues the principle of bivalence is. To grasp why, consider why truth tables work for classical logic: first, it must be the case that the variable parts of the proposition are either true or false: if they could be other values, or fail to have truth values at all, then the truth table analysis of logical connectives would not exhaust the possible ways these could be applied. For example intuitionistic logic respects the classical truth tables, but not the laws of classical logic, because intuitionistic logic allows propositions to be other than true