Premise

A premise or premiss is a statement that an argument claims will induce or justify a conclusion. In other words: a premise is an assumption that something is true. In logic, an argument requires a set of (at least) two declarative sentences (or "propositions") known as the premises or premisses along with another declarative sentence (or "proposition") known as the conclusion. This structure of two premises and one conclusion forms the basic argumentative structure. More complex arguments can use a series 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:

It is evident that a tacitly understood claim is that Socrates is a man. The fully expressed reasoning is thus:

Premise (disambiguation)

Premise (from the Latin praemissa [propositio], meaning "placed in front") can refer to:

Premise (filmmaking)

The premise of a film or screenplay is the fundamental concept that drives the plot.

Most premises can be expressed very simply, and many films can be identified simply from a short sentence describing the premise. For example: A lonely boy is befriended by an alien; A small town is terrorized by a shark; A small boy sees dead people.

See also