Deduction: process of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the stated premises.
An argument whose premise(s) are supposed to logically imply its conclusion.
In ordinary language, another word for reasoning, as in, “When he saw the smoke, he deduced (made the deduction that) the engine overheated.” In the discipline of logic, deduction is used as a technical term typically to mean necessary consequence (entailment) (see “Deductive Logic“).
