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The "thesis statement" comes from the concept of a thesis (θέσῐς, thésis) as it was articulated by Aristotle in Topica. Aristotle's definition of a thesis is "a conception which is contrary to accepted opinion." He also notes that this contrary view must come from an informed position; not every contrary view is a thesis. [3]
For example, "Snow is white" (in English) and "Schnee ist weiß" (in German) are different sentences, but they say the same thing, so they express the same proposition. Another definition of proposition is: Two meaningful declarative sentence-tokens express the same proposition, if and only if they mean the same thing. [citation needed]
Examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic. [ 2 ] Frederick Crews uses the term to mean a type of essay and categorizes essays as falling into four types, corresponding to four basic functions of prose: narration , or telling; description , or picturing; exposition , or explaining; and argument , or ...
Logic has developed artificial languages, for example sentential calculus and predicate calculus, partly with the purpose of revealing the underlying logic of natural-language statements, the surface grammar of which may conceal the underlying logical structure. In these artificial languages an atomic sentence is a string of symbols which can ...
The fifth and sixth examples are meaningful declarative sentences, but are not statements but rather matters of opinion or taste. Whether or not the sentence "Pegasus exists." is a statement is a subject of debate among philosophers. Bertrand Russell held that it is a (false) statement. [citation needed] Strawson held it is not a statement at all.
As Aristotle pointed out, since some sentences are questions, commands, or meaningless, not all can be truth-bearers. If in the proposal "What makes the sentence Snow is white true is the fact that snow is white" it is assumed that sentences like Snow is white are truth-bearers, then it would be more clearly stated as "What makes the meaningful-declarative-sentence Snow is white true is the ...
Hume's law or Hume's guillotine [1] is the thesis that an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred from purely descriptive factual statements. [ 2 ] A similar view is defended by G. E. Moore 's open-question argument , intended to refute any identification of moral properties with natural properties , which is asserted by ethical ...
The form of an argument can be shown by the use of symbols. For each argument form, there is a corresponding statement form, called a corresponding conditional, and an argument form is valid if and only if its corresponding conditional is a logical truth. A statement form which is logically true is also said to be a valid statement form.