I think that, due to Witters and Grice, is important that we qualify the
tautology as patent. From Wikipedia:
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
"If an argument form is valid, the conjunction of the premises will be
logically equivalent to the conclusion and this can be clearly seen in a
truth table; it is displayed. The concept of TAUTOLOGY is thus central to
Wittgenstein's Tractarian account of logical consequence, which is
strictly
deductive."
I would think passages like that is what Grice is thinking about when he
qualifies his 'tautology' as being 'patent' (qua vehicle for implicature).
For a propositional-logic statement which is tautological but not patently so
may DRAMATICALLY fail to implicate -- as many a student logic has found
out after reviewing why she got such a bad grade in her course!
In a message dated 12/1/2015 1:34:18 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx is right in writing that a 'patent' tautology, such
as:
i. War is war.
ii. Women are women.
or
iii. Enough is enough
would receive a different treatment in TLP or PI.
The logical form of such patent tautologies seems to be:
iv. S is S.
Or as Geary (who is into algebra) might prefer:
v. S = S.
This itself is controversial since "=" is not a primitive sign in
"Principia Mathematica", and so the logical form may be MUCH SUBTLER.
McEvoy:
"W-TLP would either treat "Enough is enough" as a tautology or as a kind
of nonsense such as he then deemed ethical or other non-scientific
propositions,"
I think both possibilities may need to be taken seriously.
POSSIBILITY ONE: TAUTOLOGY qua FIGURE OF SPEECH, and its attending
implicature.
If (i), (ii), and (iii) are tautologies (from a Greek word that means, 'to
repeat oneself', more or less), seeing that Witters in TLP does use
'tautology', they would constitute 'analytic' truths, devoid of informative
content. Since his, in TLP, is a 'picture theory of meaning', tautologies such
as (i), (ii), or (iii) depict no state of affairs. Yet, they seem important
in accounts of 'natural deduction' of the type Witters is thinking about.
POSSIBILITY TWO: piece of nonsense.
This reminds me of ... Grice. He said that if he learned ONE thing in
Oxford was Cook Wilson seriously addressing him (i.e. Grice) and saying:
vi. What we know we know.
Witters would say this is philosophical nonsense, if serious. Ramsey
retorted that it is philosophical nonsense, and silly one at that.
Or consider Parmenides:
vii. Being is, non-Being is not.
This sounds tautological; yet historians of Ancient Philosophers adore it!
The principle of tautology may be said to be rooted, metaphorically, in the
so-called (by Aristotle?) 'law' (of course not in Hart's usage of the
term) of 'identity' and that of 'non-contradiction', and for ages (e.g. by
generations of professors of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford) it was debated
if such laws were logical, psychological _or what_.
McEvoy:
"[B]ut W-PI would be able to take account of its varieties of sense since
he was no longer wedded to a general theory of 'sense' that claimed to hold
for all language."
Well, it may be argued that there is a minor problem for the Griceian, as
it were, or the early Witters of the TLP. If (i), (ii), and (iii) are all
tautologies, they say nothing.
Yet, they seem to say different things: one says that war is war; the
other that women are women; and the third that enough is enough.
So the _sense_ seems to be different.
While the common (shared) logical form is indeed
viii. S = S.
we have in one case:
ix. Wa = Wa (War is War)
x. Wo = Wo (Women are women)
and
xi. E = E (Enough is enough).
(Geary expands on the need of 'women' being plural here: "Woman is woman"
sounds rude, or "Tarzan-like," as he prefers, cfr. "Jane is Jane")
In any case, it would be no wonder that Witters -- the Witters of the PI
now -- can explain the difference. This is precisely how Grice's gloss runs:
Re the "patent" (vs. more obscure) tautologies like "Women are women" and
"War is war" [and "Enough is enough" -- Speranza], Grice writes what is 'at
issue'.
Grice notes:
"I would wish to maintain that at the
level of what is said, in my favoured
sense [of 'say' -- as when the New York Times
reports, "Obama Says 'Enough is Enough'"], such
remarks are totally non-informative and
so, at that level, cannot but infringe the
[desideratum of informativeness] in
any conversational context. They are,
of course, informative at the level of
what is implicated, and the [addressee]s identification
of their informative content at
*this* level is dependent on his
ability to explain the [utterer]'s selection
of this _particular_ patent tautology."
E.g. in the recent Obama case, it would have been conversationally
cooperative to conclude his discourse with "Flowers are flowers," for example.
It seems that while (i) and (ii) are UNIVERSAL -- and translate to most
languages, (iii) does not.
I don't think it can be translated to Tagalog.
But on the other hand, a lot of these type of 'patent tautologies' seem
"idiomatic" as Grice would have it.
(Indeed, "War is war" and "Women are women," the two examples Grice gives,
_are_ idiomatic -- Grice uses 'idiom' technically: thus:
xii. He is pushing up the daisies.
is an 'idiom'. But
xii. He is fertilizing the daffodils.
is _not_.
One problem with 'Enough is enough' seems to be its surface (rather than
'depth' as I think the Witters of the PI would call it) grammar.
In the Romance languages, you need to specify 'enough' and turn it into a
sort of noun, with an article, to boot, to identify the _denotatum_ with
itself.
Or is the 'enough' in
iii. Enough is enough.
a noun already? (as in Heidegger's infamous, "The Noth noths" -- is this
tautological?).
It has to be because only nouns (or pro-nouns, i.e. particles that work
'pro' nouns) can work as subjects (vide Strawson, "Subject and predicate in
logic and grammar").
To echo Grice, the 'the informative content' of "Enough is enough" is
dependent on the ability of the addressee to EXPLAIN the utterer's choice of
this particular patent tautology -- since all tautologies (whatever their
content, even if void) seem equivalent at the level of what is said -- zero
informative.
"Enough" is I think what Altham calls a pleonetetic quantifier, or
'determiner' as Wikipedia prefers.
It presupposes a 'threshold'. So the implicature seems to be "no more".
But then cfr. the not so patent tautology, "More than enough is too much".
The wise Wikipedia at
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enough
has 'enough' first and foremost as a
determiner
meaning, 'sufficient; all that is required, needed, or appropriate -- as
in
"I've already had enough coffee today."
(cfr. "I've already had Brazilian coffee today").
Or:
"Are you man enough to fight me?"
(Cfr. "Is your horse horse enough to run at the Derby?")
But, Wikipedia goes on, 'enough' is also an "adverb"
meaning "sufficientLY" -- as in
"I cannot run fast enough to catch up to them".
Qua adverb, 'enough' can be used to mean "fully; quite; used to express
slight augmentation of the positive degree, and sometimes equivalent to
"very", as in:
"He is ready enough to accept the offer".
(Cfr. "He is very ready to accept the offer." -- or Geary's favourite
example: "My apartment was so small there was barely room enough to lay my hat
and my two friends.").
Then, to delight P. T. Geach (Altham's teacher at Cambridge), 'enough' can
be a pro-noun, when it is used to mean "a sufficient or adequate number,
amount, etc.", as in
"I have enough to keep me going."
Or _simpliciter_, "We've had enough."
It can lastly be an "interjection" (as Witters's "Slab!") as in "Enough!",
used to mean something like"Stop! Don't do that anymore, etc."
While 'Enough is enough' is idiomatic, it is perhaps this idiomaticy that
is at the root of its ability to trigger an implicature. "Very is very"
hardly does it.
There seems to be a difference between the two examples of tautology given
by Grice:
ii. War is war.
and
iii. Women are women.
and our
i. Enough is enough.
It may be alleged that a politician who utters (i) is not committing to
something as he would would he to say:
xiii. This is enough. No more of this.
But what would the conversational contributions that would make Grice's
examples appropriate? I used to play with answers to the same question,
regarding the policy by Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War.
Uttering
ii. War is war.
seems to justify war.
iii. Women are women.
seem to 'justify' women.
None of this seems apt in
i. Enough is enough.
The use of the singular 'is' makes "Enough is enough" more comparable to
"War is war". The idiom could well be, "Wars are wars", in which case the
argument falls.
But the use of a singular 'is' may be of interest here in terms of logical
form.
iii. Women are women.
displays a logical form which uses the plural -- a complex feature for
logicians. Usually, a logician would formalise as "All women are women"
anyway. Ditto for "All wars are wars."
None of this is applicable to (i): "All enoughs are enoughs" is not even
grammatical!
Yet, there is a practicality to a conclusion of a moral argument
_concluding_ with the tautology 'Enough is enough' which "Women are women" and
"War
is war" -- being justificatory, merley -- lack.
The immediate implicate, "And we will tolerate no more of this" comes as
short-circuited,
Horn uses (+) and (-) for positive and negative evaluative features. It
seems the implicature of "Enough is enough" HAS to be negative. There is no
easy way to believe that the implicature of 'enough is enough' will be
something, "Give me more". This asymmetry is not logical, but implicatural, as
Grice would agree!
And so on. Perhaps the important thing is 'tautology', rather than
'patent'. Grice was into listing figures of rhetoric and checking which
triggered
this or that implicature, and why?
If a child is taught (by his parents), as Grice suggests, to be as
informative as is required, and then hears his uncle say,
"Enough is enough."
the child may come up with "I'm proud of you". I.e. the child notices that
the uncle is 'flouting' the requirement of informativeness, and more
importantly, he is finding that his uncle TRUSTS him to catch this flouting and
the consequent implicature. A good reason to be proud, I say!
It may be alleged that Grice and Witters are working with propositional
logic and their patent implicatures (although Grice's two examples, and
"Enough is enough" belongs to 'predicate logic', rather). Propositional logic
is
decidable; predicate logic is not. Therefore, there are, strictly, no
tautologies in predicate logic, because they depend on semantic assignments and
semantic tableaux, and there is no algorithm that states that the
assignment is 'decidable' in Goedel's use of the term (he was a terrible
indecesive
logician). So one has to be careful, or not -- which is a patent tautology,
but fortunately, a propositional-logic one; so there.
Cheers,
Speranza
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
