Inference & kinds of Inference — Immediate and mediate

From ‘All contracts require consideration’ you can, on your own, draw ‘Some contracts require consideration’ — no second fact needed. But to conclude ‘This agreement is void’, you need a second premise about this particular agreement as well. One move needed a single starting point; the other needed two. That difference — one proposition versus more than one — is exactly what separates immediate inference from mediate inference, the spine of this entire module.

In two minutes

Inference is the process of reaching a new proposition (the conclusion) on the ground of one or more other propositions (the premises) already accepted; when the conclusion is drawn from a single premise it is called immediate inference, and when it requires two or more premises taken together it is called mediate inference.

The rest of this chapter

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