 Abelard observes that the same propositional content can be expressed with different force in different contexts: the content that Socrates is in the house is expressed in an assertion in ‘Socrates is in the house’; in a question in ‘Is Socrates in the house?’; in a wish in ‘If only Socrates were in the house!’ and so on. Hence Abelard can distinguish in particular the assertive force of a sentence from its propositional content, a distinction that allows him to point out that the component sentences in a conditional statement are not asserted, though they have the same content they do when asserted—‘If Socrates is in the kitchen, then Socrates is in the house’ does not assert that Socrates is in the kitchen or that he is in the house, nor do the antecedent or the consequent, although the same form of words could be used outside the scope of the conditional to make such assertions. Likewise, the distinction allows Abelard to define negation, and other propositional connectives, purely truth-functionally in terms of content, so that negation, for instance, is treated as follows: not-p is false/true if and only if p is true/false.