 A hypothetical syllogism is a syllogism in which one or more premises are hypothetical sentences. Boethius draws the distinction between categorical sentences and hypothetical sentences formally by saying that a categorical sentence involves a predication whereas a hypothetical sentence involves a condition, i.e., it says that something is, if something else is. Typically such sentences are conditional sentences such as ‘if P then Q’, though Boethius also treats ‘P or Q’ as hypothetical, apparently because he thinks that disjunction can be translated in terms of a conditional sentence. Another characteristic of hypothetical sentences is that they are made up of categorical sentences.