Assumptions, Premises and Antecedents

The distinction between the notions in the title, if followed by an appropriate pragmatic theory, can be more useful than it is usually recognized. I will explain the distinction and try to show its explanatory power through an examination of three well known paradoxes (the fatalism paradox, the so called direct argument, and a counterexample to modus ponens). For each of the paradoxes many different and often unrelated solutions have been proposed. I will argue that by using the distinction we can explain away all three of them.