Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>One time-honored understanding of logic is as the study of how to deductively infer, where such inference is construed as a distinctive activity of the mind. Curiously, though, this conception of logic seems to be almost entirely absent from contemporary disputes in the philosophy of logic. This book attempts to improve the situation by investigating the nature and structure of inference with special attention to how it could fruitfully act as the object of investigation in an activity like formal logic. A central claim of the book is that recent philosophical work has gradually opened space for inference and logic to newly stand in relationships of mutual illumination. On the one hand, even a skeletal account of inference can be used to provide revealing insights into the vexing issue of how logic can be normative for reasoning. And on the other, a puzzle about how illogical things cannot be imagined points to a special kind of cognitive state, which can in turn be used in a reductive analysis of deductive inference that explains some of its most perplexing features.</jats:p>