Analytic–synthetic distinction
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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 and is the opposite of falsism.
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 incontestable. A statement which is true by definition ("All cats are mammals.") would also be considered a truism. This is quite similar to a tautology in which the conclusion of a statement is essentially equivalent to its premise, a statement that is true by virtue of its logical form alone.
The word may be used to disguise the fact that a proposition is really just an opinion, especially in rhetoric. A saying about people or an accepted truth about life in general is also a truism.
See also
- Aphorism
- Axiom
- Cliché
- Commonplace
- Contradiction
- Dictum
- Fact
- Figure of speech
- Jacques de la Palice
- Maxim
- Moral
- Synthetic proposition
- Tautology
