An affirmation implies the assent of something.
Affirmation , from the Latin affirmatio , is the action and effect of affirming or asserting oneself . It is common for the term to be used in reference to the act that allows a person to express their assent to a statement or a cause. For example: "With a gesture of affirmation, the interrogated acknowledged that he knew the suspect" , "The woman's statement surprised the neighbors" , "I cannot agree with such a statement" .
The affirmation reflects the acceptance of a belief that is considered valid due to evidence or certainty. It is possible to consider, however, various degrees or types of affirmation depending on the awareness of the veracity of what is affirmed. In this sense, statements can be opinions , decisions , sentences , etc.
Statement example
A police interrogation that takes place in search of a suspect's answers to solve a murder case can lead to affirmations and denials. If the interrogated person is asked if he was at the scene of the crime and he assures that he was not, he will have denied the accusation. On the other hand, if you ask him if it is true that he works as a mechanic in a workshop and the person answers yes, he will have given his affirmation to said question.
Affirmations can be associated, in a certain way, with everything said by a person. After all, what is put into words is an extension of what the subject thinks. Expressions such as "In my opinion, the opposition candidate should resign his candidacy" , "Chicken with garlic is my favorite food" and "I left my house at eight in the morning and was only able to get on the train at a quarter to eleven » are statements uttered by an individual.
In some contexts, affirmation is equivalent to approval.
Lack of foundations
But the nature of a statement is not always the basis , since for various cultural reasons, human beings are accustomed to repeating data that we have acquired passively, without analyzing its veracity , without contrasting its sources. One of the fields in which this lack of theoretical support occurs most is health: we are all capable of describing the characteristics of a cold, from the reasons why it appears to its evolution and the methods of combating it, but almost no one has technical knowledge or studies with which you can defend said information.
This does not mean that a large percentage of people lie on a daily basis, but rather that the meaning of the word statement is broad, and depends on the context in which it is used. Furthermore, stating something false while believing it to be true cannot be classified as a lie but, in any case, as negligence .
Logical equivalences and statements
A similarity in truth that exists between two or more expressions, as long as any of them is valid, is known as logical equivalence . In other words, to verify a given case you can take one statement or another from the group without this affecting the final result. The most used method to demonstrate equivalences is the truth table .
As easy as it may seem to analyze the veracity of a statement in everyday life, logic goes beyond the simple verification that we can perform on a daily basis, and decomposes each expression into parts, studies the way in which they are related and It treats them as if they were mathematical equations, so that a demonstration of equivalences yields results that are impossible to refute.
In declarative algebra , also called propositional , logical expressions are manipulated through variables and constants to represent truth values, and there are various schemes that serve to solve equivalences, as if they were mathematical properties that help clear up unknowns. of an equation.