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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 ...
In English the words therefore, so, because and hence typically separate the premises from the conclusion of an argument. Thus: Socrates is a man, all men are mortal therefore Socrates is mortal is an argument because the assertion Socrates is mortal follows from the preceding statements.
A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises. The philosophical analysis of logical consequence involves the questions: In what sense does a conclusion follow from its premises? and What does it mean for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises ...
Intermediate conclusions or sub-conclusions, where a claim is supported by another claim that is used in turn to support some further claim, i.e. the final conclusion or another intermediate conclusion: In the following diagram, statement 4 is an intermediate conclusion in that it is a conclusion in relation to statement 5 but is a premise in ...
The conclusion is rephrased to look different and is then placed in the premises. — Paul Herrick [ 2 ] For example, one can obscure the fallacy by first making a statement in concrete terms, then attempting to pass off an identical statement, delivered in abstract terms, as evidence for the original. [ 17 ]
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A set of premises together with a conclusion is called an argument. [23] [3] An inference is the mental process of reasoning that starts from the premises and arrives at the conclusion. [18] [24] But the terms "argument" and "inference" are often used interchangeably in logic. The purpose of arguments is to convince a person that something is ...
That is, the word "valid" does not refer to the truth of the premises or the conclusion, but rather to the form of the inference. An inference can be valid even if the parts are false, and can be invalid even if some parts are true. But a valid form with true premises will always have a true conclusion.