In deductive reasoning, if the major and minor premises are both true, the resulting conclusion is logically guaranteed to be true.

This classic example uses the minor premise "Socrates is a man" to deduce his mortality, meaning he is inevitably subject to death.

Aristotle introduced this system in his text Prior Analytics, creating the first known framework to systematically analyze deductive reasoning.

Introduced by John Venn in 1880, these diagrams use three overlapping circles to visually confirm if a conclusion necessarily follows the premises.