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Concept
Premise
Summary
A premise or premiss is a proposition—a true or false declarative statement—used in an argument to prove the truth of another proposition called the conclusion. 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 false, the argument says nothing about whether the conclusion is true or false. For instance, a false premise on its own does not justify rejecting an argument's conclusion; to assume otherwise is a logical fallacy called denying the antecedent. One way to prove that a proposition is false is to formulate a sound argument with a conclusion that negates that proposition.
An argument is sound and its conclusion logically follows (it is true) if and only if the argument is valid and its premises are true.
An argument is valid if and only if when the premises are all true, the conclusion must also be true. If there exists a logical interpretation where the premises are all true but the conclusion is false, the argument is invalid.
Key to evaluating the quality of an argument is determining if it is valid and sound. That is, whether its premises are true and whether their truth necessarily results in a true conclusion.
In logic, an argument requires a set of declarative sentences (or "propositions") known as the "premises" (or "premisses"), along with another declarative sentence (or "proposition"), known as the conclusion. Complex arguments can use a sequence of rules to connect several premises to one conclusion, or to derive a number of conclusions from the original premises which then act as premises for additional conclusions. An example of this is the use of the rules of inference found within symbolic logic.
Aristotle held that any logical argument could be reduced to two premises and a conclusion. Premises are sometimes left unstated, in which case, they are called missing premises, for example:Socrates is mortal because all men are mortal.It is evident that a tacitly understood claim is that Socrates is a man.
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