PREMISE

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

• In discourse, a premise (also "premiss" in British usage) is a statement presumed true within the context of the discourse for the purposes of arguing to a conclusion. Premises are sometimes stated explicitly by way of disambiguation or for emphasis, but more often they are left tacitly understood as being obvious or self-evident ("it goes without saying"), or not conducive to succinct discourse. The accuracy or truth of the conclusion depends on both the truth of the premises and the soundness of the reasoning from the premises to the conclusion.

• In mathematics and logic, premises are the formulas on which a step of a logical argument depends to obtain a consequence of those premises. Premises may be justified either as instances of axioms of an axiomatic system, or as consequences of previous steps of the argument, or as theorems, lemmas, or corollaries that have been established as part of a larger theory, or as assumptions to be discharged later as in natural deduction.

• Premises are land and buildings together considered as a property. This usage arose from property owners finding the word in their title deeds, where it originally correctly meant "the aforementioned; what this document is about".

• In films and screenplays the premise is the situational logic driving the plot.

• A trade name for the insecticide Imidacloprid.

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