[lit-ideas] Re: Tautology, Patent & Other

  • From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: 21 Sep 2004 16:45:52 PDT

>Around here a tautology looks like this:

>"The faculty are complaining."*

John Lye (and Mike Geary) have it exactly right. It's of the essence of a
tautology that it be uninformative. 

And JL is right too (usually) in his griceful way.

Strawson and Grice seem not only wrong but inexplicably confused about the point
of what they're doing (a kind of sorting of propositions). I'm sure they meant
well.

Nobody thinks 'Tomorrow is another day,' is a tautology, even though it would be
difficult to say what things would be like if it tomorrow weren't another day,
or what empirical evidence would falsify the observation that it is. If someone
understands it as a tautology, and thereby uninformative, they've understood it
wrongly. 'Tomorrow is another day' (it's hard to spell out precisely what idioms
'really' mean) can either be an attempt at consolation, or a warning not to get
too excited about how well things are going. 

Tom: 'I still haven't found the answer.'

Alice: 'Tomorrow is another day.'

Candide: 'The sun's risen every day so far.'

Hume: 'Tomorrow is another day.'

And so it is, as Mike points out, with 'Women are women,' and 'War is war.'
'Womem are women (bless them),' 'War is war (so stop your moral dithering).' Are
all tautologies truisms? Are all truisms local? What if the faculty at St.
Catharine's stopped complaing? Well, they certainly could. 'The faculty at St.
Catharine's are not complaining' isn't self-contradictory, nor does it seem
psychologically impossible that they are not. What next? 

Donal McEvoy wonders if 2 + 2 = 4 is really a tautology, and invokes some
Kant-like expressions like 'being contained in the subject.' (Leibniz thought
that analytic propositions were those in which the predicate was _completely_
contained in the subject, with the qualification that so-called contingent
propositions are really analytic for God. From which it follows, I think, that
God knows only things that are, strictly speaking, uninformative--uninformative
in the last analysis.) When Kant says that the notion of 12 isn't 'contained in'
the notions of 5 and 7 (or of 5 and + and 7) it's hard to see what he's talking
about. If he doesn't mean that this (that five and seven are twelve) is
something some people might not immediately see, I have no idea what he means.
'I can think of 12 without thinking of 5 and 7.' This is surely true, but it
doesn't follow from it that '5 + 7 = 12' is somehow 'synthetic,' where
'synthetic' means, roughly, 'contingent.' That five and seven are twelve is
contingent on no experiment, no measuring, weighing, no vote.

Donal suggests that my original example (he's right, I threw it in because in
the Tractatus, propositions of mathematics are tautologies) might be suspicious
because some mathematical theorems have been disproved. Two things: one might
say, in this case, that the theorem, since it was never true in the first place,
could not have been analytically true; and '2 + 2 = 4' is not a _theorem_. 

I see that JL has posted again on this topic, so I'll stop for fear of saying
something redundant. (Are all tautologies redundant? Are all redundancies
tautologous? Stay tuned.)

Robert Paul
Reed College
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