Premisesfirst

Premisesfirst is a term used to describe a principle or practice in logic, argumentation, and related disciplines that prioritizes the explicit presentation of premises before the conclusions or results. The concept emphasizes that clear, verifiable premises are the foundation upon which any deduction or claim stands.

In educational settings, premisesfirst is promoted as a teaching strategy to improve reasoning skills by forcing students to articulate premises before drawing conclusions, thereby increasing transparency and critical scrutiny.

In formal logic and automated reasoning, premisesfirst manifests as procedural guidelines for argument structure, inference rules, and explanation generation, where the sequence begins with known facts or assumptions and proceeds to derived statements.

In explainable AI and rule-based systems, practitioners may adopt a premisesfirst approach to generate explanations that trace conclusions back to explicit premises, aiding user verification and trust.

Variants and criticisms: some practitioners advocate conclusions-first or hybrid approaches for brevity or cognitive load reasons. Others note that not all arguments can be cleanly separated into premises and conclusions, and overly rigid ordering may obscure dependencies or tacit assumptions.

See also: argumentation theory, logical deduction, explainable AI, knowledge representation.