# Deduction

Many questions require multiple steps of inference before they can be answered. The simplest approach is to do this kind of reasoning within a single language model call—“chain of thought”, and that’s all we’re covering in the Primer right now:

* [Chain of Thought](/chapters/deduction/chain-of-thought.md): Let’s think step by step.

However, there are more compositional ways of approaching this, including the one outlined in the paper [Selection-Inference](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09712), and the reader (you) is encouraged to implement them.


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# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://primer.ought.org/chapters/deduction.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.