Truism
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A truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device.
In logic, a proposition may be a truism even if it is not a tautology, a restatement of a definition, or a theorem derived from axioms that are generally held to be true. In fact, some would say that such analytic propositions should not be regarded as truisms.
In philosophy, a sentence which asserts incomplete truth conditions for a proposition may be regarded as a truism. An example of such a sentence would be: "Under appropriate conditions, the sun rises." Without contextual support — a statement of what those appropriate conditions are — the sentence is true but uncontestable.
Often the word is used to disguise the fact that a proposition is really just a half-truth or an opinion, especially in rhetoric.
Examples
- In logic: "A AND NOT A is a contradiction".
- In set theory, "the intersection of a set and its complement is the empty set".
- the Anthropic principle, which states that any valid theory of the universe must allow for humans to exist also.
See also
- aphorism
- axiom
- banality
- cliché
- commonplace
- contradiction
- dictum
- fact
- figure of speech
- gospel
- Jacques de La Palice
- maxim
- moral
- synthetic proposition
- tautology
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