The premises are the propositions that allow us to reach a conclusion.
Premise is a term originating from the Latin praemissus . The concept is used to name the indication , symptom or conjecture that allows us to infer something and draw a conclusion.
For logic and philosophy , therefore, premises are those propositions that precede the conclusion . This means that said conclusion derives from the premises, although these can be true or false.
The concept in logic and philosophy
For example:
– Premise No. 1: “Human beings like the sea”
– Premise No. 2: “Facundo is a human being”
– Conclusion: “Facundo likes the sea”
As can be seen in the example, if human beings enjoy the sea and Facundo is a human being, it is possible to conclude that Facundo has to like it. Of course, the conclusion may be wrong since the first premise is not exact: there are people who do not like the sea .
True premises, false conclusion
In other cases, the premises may be true and yet the conclusion be false:
– Premise No. 1: “Every Monday, Fernanda wakes up at 8 in the morning”
– Premise No. 2: “Today, Fernanda woke up at 8 in the morning”
– Conclusion: “Today is Monday”
In this example, the conclusion can be false even though the premises are true since the first premise is not exclusive. It may be true, therefore, that Fernanda wakes up every Monday at 8 in the morning, but she can also wake up at that time any other day of the week.
Aristotle reflected on premises when studying syllogisms.
Synonym of principle, value or objective
In colloquial language, meanwhile, the idea of premise is usually used as a synonym for principle (in the moral sense), value or objective .
This is how the term is used in these senses: “The Catalan team always seeks victory based on the premise of controlling the ball,” “We started the trip at dawn with the premise of reaching our destination at lunch time.”
Premises and syllogism
A form of deductive reasoning is called a syllogism, that is, an argument in which the conclusion is obtained without exception from the premises. In this case, there are three propositions: two premises and the conclusion. The first to formulate a syllogism was the Greek philosopher and logician Aristotle in his work entitled " The Organon ", which can be translated as "the instrument."
According to Aristotle, logic is a relationship of terms , which come together or are divided in judgments, and in his vision of the latter, a subject and a predicate also intervene. Although the concept of judgment is sometimes confused with that of proposition, there are clear differences: the first attributes a predicate to a logical subject and a semantic and a syntactic function to the terms; The proposition, on the other hand, is an assertion of a fact as logical content, turning it into a whole.
From trials to conclusion
The terms of a judgment are related to each other and their comparison with one that could be considered average gives the possibility of conclusions appearing. In this way, the syllogism is made up of two judgments, the major premise and the minor one, in which three terms are compared with each other and from there a new one is born, which is called conclusion. The laws of logic try to ensure that the truth of the first three holds in the fourth.
The fundamental structure of a syllogism is the following:
* Antecedent , made up of the major premise (with the predicate of the conclusion, represented by the letter P) and the minor premise (the subject of the conclusion, represented by the letter S), which are compared taking into account the middle term , represented with the M;
* Consequential , which is the result of said comparison .