provability


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prove

 (pro͞ov)
v. proved, proved or prov·en (pro͞o′vən), prov·ing, proves
v.tr.
1.
a. To establish the truth or validity of (something) by the presentation of argument or evidence: The novel proves that the essayist can write in more than one genre. The storm proved him to be wrong in his prediction.
b. To demonstrate the reality of (something): He proved his strength by doing 50 pushups.
c. To show (oneself) to be what is specified or to have a certain characteristic: proved herself to be a formidable debater; proved herself to be worthy of the task.
2. Law
a. To establish by the required amount of evidence: proved his case in court.
b. To establish the authenticity of (a will).
3. Mathematics
a. To demonstrate the validity of (a hypothesis or proposition).
b. To verify (the result of a calculation).
4. To subject (a gun, for instance) to a test.
5. Printing To make a sample impression of (type); proof.
6. Archaic To find out or learn (something) through experience.
v.intr.
To be shown to be such; turn out: a theory that proved impractical in practice; a schedule that proved to be too demanding.
Phrasal Verb:
prove out
To turn out well; succeed.

[Middle English proven, from Old French prover, from Latin probāre, to test, from probus, good; see per in Indo-European roots.]

prov′a·bil′i·ty, prov′a·ble·ness n.
prov′a·ble adj.
prov′a·bly adv.
prov′er n.
Usage Note: Prove has two past participles: proved and proven. Proved is the older form. Proven is a variant. The Middle English spellings of prove included preven, a form that died out in England but survived in Scotland, and the past participle proven probably rose by analogy with verbs like weave, woven and cleave, cloven. Proven was originally used in Scottish legal contexts, such as The jury ruled that the charges were not proven. In the 1900s, proven made inroads into the territory once dominated by proved, so that now the two forms compete on equal footing as participles. However, when used as an adjective before a noun, proven is now the more common word: a proven talent.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.provability - capability of being demonstrated or logically proved
indisputability, indubitability, unquestionability, unquestionableness - the quality of being beyond question or dispute or doubt
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
References in periodicals archive ?
They will for instance equally hold for certain notions of provability.1 Now it is true that various notions of provability will have their own distinctive axioms which distinguish them from metaphysical necessity.
It extends the guard computation mechanism from a simple one-way unification solving problem to a more general provability check of conditions in the guard part under a given set of constraints using the ash operation.
Godel's second theorem is included because it involves an iteration of deviant coextensive provability operations that satisfy different principles in Peano arithmetic, relevant to the mechanistic arguments in the philosophy of mind.
(such as correspondence to reality, provability, etc.), which is supposed to specify what truth is.
In other words, in the case of empirical discourse the perfect analogue of the antirealist notion of constructive provability is the notion of constructive falsifiability.
To motivate this, McGee points out that D is a notion of provability, and that, surprising as it is, analogous principles (though they may be true) are not provable.
"I assumed [Carnap writes] that he had in mind a syntactical definition of logical truth or provability. I was surprised when he said that he meant truth in the customary sense, including contingent factual truth.
For example if we add to first-order Peano arithmetic the statement that Peano arithmetic is inconsistent, the resulting provability logic fails to count as modal by Koslow's criterion.
First, Dummett believes that an intuitionistic provability semantics already is his kind of theory of meaning for restricted cases.
Boolos, George 1993: The Logic of Provability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
We know, for example, that if the system is consistent there is an undecidable sentence, and we know this in addition to the provability of the sentence which expresses that conditional in the formal system: the impoverished "omniscience" that Grim outlines would not know the metamathematical propositions but only, if it made sense to speak so, the formal analogues of them.
They discuss Cantor and infinity, axiomatic set theory, elementary number theory, computability and provability, Hilbert's tenth problem and applications of it, and Hilbert's tenth problem over number fields.