- Truism
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 , aproposition may be a truism even if it is not a tautology, a restatement of adefinition , or atheorem derived fromaxiom s that are generally held to be true. In fact, some would say that suchanalytic proposition s 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. A statement which is true by definition ("All cats are mammals.") would also be considered a truism.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
* Some versions of the
Anthropic principle , which states that any valid theory of the universe must allow for humans to exist also.See also
*
Aphorism
*Axiom
*Cliché
*Commonplace
*Contradiction
*Dictum
*Fact
*Figure of speech
*Gospel
*Jacques de la Palice
* Maxim
*Moral
*Synthetic proposition
* Tautology
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