Argument

Premise

Overview

A premise is a proposition offered to support a conclusion. Premises are true or false statements that serve as the starting points of arguments by presenting reasons to substantiate or refute assertions. For example, the premises "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" guarantee the conclusion "Socrates is mortal".

Different types of premises are distinguished by their mode of expression, their role in arguments, and their content. Explicit premises are overtly stated, whereas implicit premises are tacitly assumed without appearing in the text, often involving uncontroversial common-sense information shared by speaker and audience. Independent premises present distinct reasons, providing separate support for the conclusion. They contrast with dependent premises, which only work in combination. Other distinctions concern whether premises appear as first or intermediate steps in complex arguments, whether they are affirmative or negative, and whether they are descriptive or normative.

Typically, premises are used either to preserve truth when drawing a conclusion, or to transfer justification from accepted statements to the claim being argued for. To succeed, premises must be true or justified and must be relevant to the conclusion. The premises of deductively valid arguments provide the strongest support: if the premises are true, then the conclusion cannot be false. The premises of non-deductive arguments aim to make the conclusion more reasonable or increase its probability, such as inductive, abductive, and analogical arguments. Defective arguments, called fallacies, can often arise from faulty premises. For example, premises may contain false information, confuse the audience with irrelevant details, or use ambiguous terms that mislead by shifting meaning. Premises are central to many fields, including logic, argumentation theory, mathematics, philosophy, science, and law.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Premise is discussed.

The minor premise asserts that the thing or set of things which are the subject of that premise, have the first-mentioned attribute; and the conclusion is, that they have (or that they have not) the second. Thus in our former example, All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, the subject and predicate of the major premise are connotative terms, denoting objects and connoting attributes…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
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In order to detect the fallacy, the proposition thus silently assumed must be supplied; but the reasoner, most likely, has never really asked himself what he was assuming; his confuter, unless permitted to extort it from him by the Socratic mode of interrogation, must himself judge what the suppressed premise ought to be in order to support the conclusion. And hence, in the words of Archbishop Whately, “it must be…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
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The second premise can only be true when we admit the existence of the prophets, and that the miracles are only performed by those who are the true claimants for prophetic mission. We would say that this premise is not true but for those who believe the existence of the prophets and the miracles. For instance if it has become clear to man, that the universe is created, then he certainly knows that the world exists…
Averroës, The Philosophy and Theology of Averroes
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The particular habit of mind which governs this or that inference may be formulated in a proposition whose truth depends on the validity of the inferences which the habit determines; and such a formula is called a _guiding principle_ of inference. Suppose, for example, that we observe that a rotating disk of copper quickly comes to rest when placed between the poles of a magnet, and we infer that this will happen…
Charles S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic
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A clew to the matter may be found in the fact that the supporters of the "interest" side of the controversy habitually use the term "self-interest." Starting from the premises that unless there is interest in an object or idea, there is no motive force, they end with the conclusion that even when a person claims to be acting from principle or from a sense of duty, he really acts as he does because there "is…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
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Premise

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Premise

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