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A premise or premiss [a] is a proposition—a true or false declarative statement—used in an argument to prove the truth of another proposition called the conclusion. [1] Arguments consist of a set of premises and a conclusion. An argument is meaningful for its conclusion only when all of its premises are true. If one or more premises are ...
For example, in UK, people speak of "Crown property" meaning property belonging to the State. Similarly: "The White House had no comment to make." Minor premise – statement in an argument. Moral reasoning – reasoning employed in rhetoric that determines a conclusion based on evidence; used in issues of ethics, religion, economics, and politics.
Deductive arguments are sometimes referred to as "truth-preserving" arguments. For example, consider the argument that because bats can fly (premise=true), and all flying creatures are birds (premise=false), therefore bats are birds (conclusion=false). If we assume the premises are true, the conclusion follows necessarily, and it is a valid ...
eager or intent on, example: he is keen to get to work on time. desirable or just right, example: "peachy keen" – "That's a pretty keen outfit you're wearing." (slang going out of common usage) keeper a curator or a goalkeeper: one that keeps (as a gamekeeper or a warden) a type of play in American football ("Quarterback keeper")
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
Premises are land and buildings together considered as a property. This usage arose from property owners finding the word in their title deeds , where it originally correctly meant "the aforementioned; what this document is about", from Latin prae-missus = "placed before".
The premise of a text such as a book, film, or screenplay is the initial state of affairs that drives the plot. Most premises can be expressed very simply, and many films can be identified simply from a short sentence describing the premise.
We begin with a famous example: All humans are mortal. All Greeks are humans. All Greeks are mortal. The reader can check that the premises and conclusion are true, but logic is concerned with inference: does the truth of the conclusion follow from that of the premises? The validity of an inference depends on the form of the inference.