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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 ...
The process of reasoning from one or more statements (premises) to reach a logically certain conclusion. deduction theorem A theorem stating that if a statement can be derived from a set of premises together with another statement, then the conclusion can be derived from the premises alone by adding the statement as a conditional. deductive ...
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.
From the example above, humans, mortal, and Greeks: mortal is the major term, and Greeks the minor term. The premises also have one term in common with each other, which is known as the middle term; in this example, humans. Both of the premises are universal, as is the conclusion. Major premise: All mortals die. Minor premise: All men are mortals.
Other ways to express this are that there is no reason to accept the premises unless one already believes the conclusion, or that the premises provide no independent ground or evidence for the conclusion. [3] Circular reasoning is closely related to begging the question, and in modern usage the two generally refer to the same thing. [4]
Premises and conclusions are normally seen as propositions. A proposition is a statement that makes a claim about what is the case. In this regard, propositions act as truth-bearers: they are either true or false. [18] [19] [3] For example, the sentence "The water is boiling." expresses a proposition since it can be true or false.
Consider the modal account in terms of the argument given as an example above: All frogs are green. Kermit is a frog. Therefore, Kermit is green. The conclusion is a logical consequence of the premises because we can not imagine a possible world where (a) all frogs are green; (b) Kermit is a frog; and (c) Kermit is not green.
Examples: The column-14 operator (OR), shows Addition rule: when p=T (the hypothesis selects the first two lines of the table), we see (at column-14) that p∨q=T. We can see also that, with the same premise, another conclusions are valid: columns 12, 14 and 15 are T.