Determining whether you believe a statement to be true is the self-confidence of one that his/her statement is true based upon some situation or a particular case. It is important to identify and determine if a statement is true or false in a real-life situation as it provides a way to test the knowledge of any person.
A statement that is true means that it has some logic and empirically verifiable. Also, just because a sentence contains truth value, doesn’t mean it is a meaningful sentence.
This article will be discussed about what are statements, their types, whether to believe a statement is true or not, few examples, and also the various conditions of the statements.
What is the meaning of a statement?
Statements are the types of sentences that can be defined as true or false. If it declares is defining a particular case, then it is a true statement. But, it is false if what it declares is not the case.
For example, “Kota express is always late.” This might be a false statement, as Kota express sometimes reaches on time or sometimes even before the time. Someone in anger might have used this statement, but it does not declare the case.
Another situation where one can determine that a statement is true even if he/she doesn’t know the veracity. For example, “Saloni greeted everybody with a smile“. In this statement there can be two situations:
- Saloni was smiling and then she greeted everybody.
- Maybe people were smiling and also some people not smiling and Saloni greeted only the ones smiling.
This type of statement describes two different things and makes it ambiguous.
Types of statements
- Analytic Statement. Its truth value is determined by the terms of its meaning. For example, “All squares are four-sided”.
- Tautologous statement. The statements are true on basis of their logical syntax structure.
- Synthetic Statement: The statements whose truth value is dependent on the way the world is. These are those which cannot be determined by their semantic meaning. For example, “Anuradhapura is the largest city in Sri Lanka”.
- Contingent Statement: They can logically either be true or false.
- Priori: Anything known self-sufficiently of any particular observation of the way the world is. A statement is said to be “priori” if one can determine its truth value without any appeal to the facts of observation.
➡LEARN MORE: How to write a statement for Court
Statements and Conditional Statements
Much of the work in mathematics deals with statements. In mathematics, a statement is a declarative statement that is either true or false.
For example, there exists a real no. x in 2x+5= 10.
A Conditional statement is the one that can be written in the form “if R then S”, where R and S are sentences. In this statement, R is called a hypothesis, and Q is called a conclusion.
There are four cases under these conditional statements:
- R is true and S is also true.
- R is false and S is false.
- R is true and S is false
- R is false, S is true.
An example of a conditional statement defining the four cases
“If it is a sunny day, then Hena will go to the park”.
Here, this statement can be defined as the conditional statement (R – S), where R is the statement – it is a sunny day, and S is the statement – Hena will go to the park.
The following four cases are:
- R and S both are true. In this case both the statements,” it is a sunny day” and “Hena will go to the park” are true.
- R and S both are false. In this case, it was not claimed that what will happen if it is not a sunny day, so this statement is also true in the context of R and S.
- R is true but S is false. In this case, the statement can be false as it is a sunny day but “Hena will go to the park” this statement is not clarified here that even if it is a sunny day, Hena will go to the park.
- R is false and S is true. In this case, the statement R i.e. it is not sunny and Hena will go to the park. This statement can be considered true as it is not clarified that what will happen if it is not a sunny day.