Erin Holder asks: >>Is "That's that" a tautology? I replied, 'yes'. She further inquires: >So it's only a tautology if it >has fixed indexicals? I would think so. Indexicals are a trick, as you know. "I met this man at the park, and he said,...". In this case, 'this' ('this man') is _not_ really 'indexical'. On the other hand, some people have argued that 'the' (as in 'the king of France is bald') _is_ indexical -- and I see the point (Grice lists 'the' along with the other logical operators, and 'some' and 'all' in Logic and Conversation, for treatment in the implicature theory). When it comes to 'that', it's somewhere between 'the', 'a', 'this' and -- I love to add -- 'yonder'. The spectrum being from total indefiniteness ('a') to definiteness ('the'), via demonstration -- which can be 'proximate' -- 'this' --, 'medial' -- 'that' -- and 'distal' -- 'yonder'). In this logic, 'That's that' should be understood as involving some level of 'variable': "That x is that x". This is controversial. Russell noted that "this" (rather than "this x") was the primitive sense-datum. It's best to regard the 'that' in "That's that" as a nominalised demonstrative", then. Qua indexicals, in conversation, sometimes, the _referent_ is taken for granted ("this is this and that is that"). But of course there may be occasions where what is otherwise obvious is not ("Actually, I beg to disagree: this is that and that is this" [this {a} is that {b} and that {c} is this {d}]." So, in the explicature, "That's that" becomes, using something like Grice's theory of quasi-demonstration (see 'Presupposition and Conversational Implicature'), something like: "That [α] is that [α]." and, to make a short story long, is only tautologous under that specific deictic interpretation or universe of discourse. I would be curious to know how many occurrences google.com gives for "that's that" which is _not_ followed by the conjunction "and", though. Cheers, JL ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html