These interpreters understood Aristotle to be focusing on two epistemic processes: first, the process of establishing knowledge that a conclusion follows necessarily from a set of premises (that is, on the epistemic process of extracting information implicit in explicitly given information) and, second, the process of establishing knowledge that a conclusion does not follow. People studied PRIOR ANALYTICS in order to learn more about deductive reasoning and to improve their own reasoning skills.

PA took for granted the theses (1) that not ever valid argument is obviously valid and (2) that not ever invalid argument is obviously invalid. More explicitly, PA was taken to be about “methods of logic” in Quine’s sense: methods for determining of a consequence of given premises that it indeed is a consequence of them and-which are quite different- methods for determining of a proposition not consequence of given premises that it indeed is not a consequence of them. Since the time of Aristotle's students, interpreters have considered PRIOR ANALYTICS, hereafter PA, to be a treatise about deductive reasoning, more generally, about methods of determining the validity and invalidity of premise-conclusion arguments. The Founding of Logic: Modern Interpretations of Aristotle's Logic.

Logic without ex falso quod libet