Proposition

Research

A truth-apt statement put forward for acceptance or rejection; the sharpened form of a topic that makes an essay arguable.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — proposition merriam-webster.com accessed 23 September 2026

Merriam-Webster’s logical sense is the one research writing needs: “an expression in language or signs of something that can be believed, doubted, denied or is either true or false”, alongside “the point to be discussed or maintained in argument usually stated in sentence form near the outset”. First recorded in the fourteenth century. The test in that definition is sharp and useful: if a sentence cannot be true or false, it is not a proposition, and an argument cannot rest on it.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. The research usage above is this lexicon’s own.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).