An elementary inference requires almost no additional reasoning.
Example:
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.
Therefore slavery was no longer legally permitted under the constitutional order.
The relationship is extremely direct.
A complex inference requires several connecting propositions.
For example:
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery
→ former slaves became legally free
→ they could enter employment contracts
→ employers could hire them without slave ownership
→ labor mobility increased
→ capitalist labor markets could expand.
The final conclusion is much farther from the initial fact.
The opposite of "elementary inference" is therefore not necessarily a special technical term. We can simply call it:
complex inference
multi-step inference
extended inference
I prefer multi-step inference because it tells the reader exactly what makes it complex.
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