Talk:Rule of inference

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Rule of inference is currently a Philosophy and religion good article nominee. Nominated by Phlsph7 (talk) at 17:09, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

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Short description: Method of deriving conclusions

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List of rules of inference

Talk:List of rules of inference#The table with 3 columns and 12 rows under the heading "Table: Rules of Inference" is currently missing 8 different rows. 88.241.82.180 (talk) 14:15, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Changes to the article

I was thinking about implementing changes to this article with the hope of moving it in the direction of GA status. Most of the text is currently unreferenced. Usually, the lead should summarize information found in the body of the article, not present new information, like it is done here.

Contentwise, a lot of information is currently missing. There are countless rules of inference and at least the most important ones should be discussed. It should be better explained that rules of inference belong to systems of logic. Different systems of logic have different rules of inference, like the contrasts between propositional logic and predicate logic or between classical and intuitionistic logic. Another point to mention would be the different formalisms of Hilbert systems, natural deduction, and sequent calculus. Other things to discuss would be the relation between rules of inference and logical truths, the problem of fallacies, and the role of rules of inference in the philosophy of logic regarding the contrast between the semantic and the syntactic conception of logic. Since some of these topics are quite abstract, one could add a section called "Basic concepts" to explain what logic, systems of logic, propositions, and inferences are. It further wouldn't hurt to mention some applications in fields like mathematical reasoning, computer science, expert systems, automated theorem proving, etc.

There are more things to consider, but they can be addressed later since the ones mentioned so far will already involve a lot of work to implement. I was hoping to get some feedback on these ideas and possibly other suggestions. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:36, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]