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

  • From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:09:45 EDT

 
 
In a message dated 9/21/2004 10:29:04 AM Eastern Standard Time,  
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>  Grice gives two good (well, kind of) examples of 'patent' (he calls  them) 
 
> tautology:
>  
>      War  is war.
>      Women are women.

I would  agree that these are tautologies - if there is such a thing as a
tautology,  which there seems to be. 

But isn't there a sense in which 'war' might  turn out not to be 'war' after
all? 



 
Indeed. The  issue would be, perhaps, to look for 'conversational' sequences 
of the  tautology,
 
        "War is war"
 
It seems to me that the tautology works best in the context of a reply to  
someone who has just uttered what McEvoy considers, viz.:
 
         "War is not war."
 
--- The dialogue would go:
 
        B: War is not war.
        A: I disagree. War is war.
 
-----
 
Now, why would B say that war is not war? The reasons are many. Note that  
she is not using deictics:
 
        "This war is no war"
 
or
 
      "This war is not a typical war"
 
---
 
B seems just plainly to be saying that war is not war. The reply from the  
logicist, A, is that, appearances to the contrary, war _is_ war.
 
I suppose the first to use the tautology was Julius Caesar, "De Bella  
Gallia": "In Gallia hiberna transalpina, bellum est bellum et nos ad nulla 
agere  
supra idque" ('Where we are now, war is war -- and there isn't really anything  
we can do about it").
 
McEvoy adds, "Green is not always green". A green leaft, for example, may  
turn yellow. Ditto, a state of war comes to an end when peace is declared, if  
that's what McEvoy means. In which case, the proper specification would  be:
 
   "What _was_ war -- e.g. between England and Germany -- is *no  longer* a 
war"
 
I don't think that, with the chronological indexes appended, this refutes  
the original tautology, though?
 
I think Grice called this 'patent tautologies' to oppose them to, inter  
alia, things like R. Paul was suggesting as examples of tautology --  
propositional-logic formula (modus ponendo ponens) or 'implicit' definitions,  
like 
'bipeds have two legs -- most of the time'.
 
Cheers,
 
JL


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