Definitions of Affirmation

Affirmation

Affirmation, from the Latin affirmatio, is the action and effect of affirming or affirming. It is usual for the term to be used in reference to the act that allows a person to express his assent to a statement or a cause. For example: “With a gesture of affirmation, the respondent acknowledged that he knew the suspect”, “The woman’s statement surprised the neighbors”, “I cannot agree with a similar statement”.

The statement reflects an assent to a belief that is considered valid by evidence or certainty. It is possible to consider, in any case, different degrees or types of affirmation according to the conscience on the veracity of the affirmed. In this sense, the affirmations can be opinions, decisions, sentences, etc.

A police interrogation carried out in search of a suspect’s answers to solve a murder case can lead to affirmations and denials. If the respondent is asked if he was at the crime scene and he assures that he was not, he will have denied the accusation. On the other hand, if you are asked if it is true that you work as a mechanic in a workshop and the person answers yes, you will have given your affirmation to that question.

Affirmations can be associated with everything said by a person. After all, what is put into words supposes an extension of what the subject thinks. Expressions like “In my opinion, the opposition candidate should give up his candidacy”, “Chicken with garlic is my favorite food” and “I left my house at eight in the morning and I was only able to get on the train at quarter to eleven ” Are statements made by an individual.

But the nature of an affirmation is not always the foundation, since for various cultural reasons human beings are used to repeating data that we have acquired passively, without analyzing its veracity, without contrasting its sources. One of the fields in which this theoretical lack of support is most common is health: we are all capable of describing the characteristics of a cold, from the reasons why it appears to its evolution and the methods of fighting it, but almost nobody has technical knowledge or studies with which you can defend such information.

This does not mean that a large percentage of people lie on a daily basis, but rather that the meaning of the word affirmation is broad, and that it depends on the context in which it is used. Furthermore, affirming something false believing that it is true cannot be classified as a lie but, in any case, negligence.

Logical equivalences

It is known by the name of logical equivalence to a similarity in terms of the truth that exists between two or more expressions, as long as any of them is valid. In other words, to verify a given case, one statement or another can be taken from the group without affecting the final result. The method most used to demonstrate equivalences is the truth table.

As easy as it may seem to analyze the truthfulness of a statement in everyday life, logic goes beyond the simple verification that we can carry out on a day-to-day basis, and breaks down each expression into parts, studies the way in which they are related and he treats them as if they were mathematical equations, so that a demonstration of equivalences yields results that are impossible to refute.

In declarative algebra, also called propositional, logical expressions are manipulated through variables and constants to represent the truth values, and there are various schemes that serve to solve the equivalences, as if they were mathematical properties that help to solve unknowns. of an equation.

Affirmation