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, and is the opposite of a falsism.^[1]

In philosophy, a sentence which asserts incomplete truth conditions for a proposition may be regarded as a truism.^[2] 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.^[3]

Lapalissades, such as "If he were not dead, he would still be alive", are considered to be truisms.

See also

• Aphorism
• Axiom
• Cliché
• Contradiction
• Dictum
• Dogma
• Figure of speech
• Maxim
• Moral
• Platitude
• Synthetic proposition
• Tautology