About this site

This page was created for the use of my Critical Thinking (PHIL 200) students at Palomar College. Naturally, other visitors are welcome.

FAIR USE OF MATERIAL ON THIS SITE:

The material on this page is not under copyright, and I hereby give permission for this material to be used by others. Note, however, that permission to copy and use material has nothing to do with the concept of plagiarism, which results from failing to adequately cite the source of ones information, or from claiming authorship of material of which one is not the author. As author, I can grant permission for this material to be used by others, but even I cannot grant permission for the material to be plagiarized. No one has that power.

A NOTE ON SPELLING:

Alert readers will notice that on this website I use the spelling "premiss" and "premisses" rather than "premise" and "premises." If correctness is to be measured by etymology rather than common practice, these spellings are preferrable to the more common spellings. According to Charles S. Peirce (and the Oxford English Dictionary backs him up on this), the word "premiss" is dervied from a medieval Latin word that refers (just as one would expect) to the portion of an argument in which justification and reasons are offered in support of a conclusion. The word "premise" is derived from a French legal term meaning "aforesaid," and in English has come to be used (usually in the plural) to refer, rather legalistically, to property (and its appurtenances), in such phrases as "to occupy the premises" and "to vacate the premises." I imagine that the custom on legal documents - eviction notices and the like - was to begin with a description of a certain property, and end with a phrase such as "The resident is hereby ordered to vacate the aforesaid." With the French word used regularly in place of "aforesaid," one would soon get the idea that "premises" was a lawyer's term of art meaning "real estate."

In fact, the two words may actually be etymologically related. The premisses of an argument are traditionally laid down before the conclusion, so they are "aforesaid" in the same sense as the description of property on a legal document. However, this etymological connection pre-dates the entry of the two words into English. Hence, in English, they are two separate words with different histories and different meanings. At one point they were also spelled differently, although they were pronounced alike (and still are). Common usage has largely dropped the original spelling of the word "premiss" and adopted the French spelling for both words. In this matter, I am still holding out against common usage, preferring to maintain the distinction in spelling for the sake of clarity.

This site was last revised on 9/2019.

WELCOME                     EXPLANATION OF PRINCIPLES                                     TABLE OF FALLACIES                        EXERCISES                     INDEX