Tautology

3 Key excerpts on "Tautology"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia

  • Louise Cummings(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  T Tautology The notion of Tautology enters the philosophy of language with Wittgenstein ’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922). There Tautology is defined as a truth-functional proposition that is ‘true for all the truth-possibilities of the elementary propositions’ (4.46, 34). In the contemporary literature, the applicability of the term has been expanded beyond sentential logic to include any proposition that is true as a matter of form, especially those that are true as a result of syntactic repetition, e.g. sentences of the forms ‘AisA’, ‘All As are As’, ‘A or not A’ or ‘If A, then A’. Following the Wittgensteinian line, all tautologies are considered to be semantically vacuous, that is, true but devoid of content. The use of utterances of tautological form in non-vacuous speech acts was noted by Grice (1975), who contends that statements like ‘Women are women’ or ‘War is war’ are ‘totally noninformative and so, at that level, cannot but infringe the first maxim of Quantity in any conversational context’ (33). The speaker’s choice to utter a particular Tautology in the context of a given conversation then forms the basis of an implicature which leads the listener to infer non-vacuous content when confronted with such an utterance. Some theorists have worked on the details of the Gricean pragmaticist approach to tautological utterances based on the maxim of quantity (Levinson 1983; Fraser 1988; Autenreith 1997). Tautologies say nothing and, since a cooperative speaker would always strive to make his conversational contributions meaningful, the meaning requires an inference on the part of the listener. Levinson (1983) argues that since one can assume the speaker is making as informative a contribution as required, the speaker’s utterance takes on a ‘dismissive or topic-closing quality’ (111). Nothing was said because there is nothing to say

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  eBook - ePub

  World and Life as One

  Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein's Early Thought

  • Martin Stokhof(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  Wittgenstein uses the term “Tautology” in an extended sense, to denote all logically valid sentences. See, for example, 6.1 and 6.12. Note that the German noun Satz can mean both “sentence” and “theorem.” 88 In effect, since 1936 we know from Church’s famous result that no effective method for testing validity of the quantificational calculus exists. 89 Compare also: Identity of reference of two expressions cannot be asserted. For in order to assert something about their reference, I must know their reference: and by knowing their reference, I know whether they refer to the same or to something different. (6.2322) An identity sentence cannot have content in the sense that it asserts something that we hold to be true but also know to be contingent. For if we know what the expressions involved refer to we know that this is either the same, or not. In both cases what we know is not contingent, but necessary. The point can also be made in a different way, namely, by pointing out that the question ?(a = b) cannot be raised significantly. For in order to understand the question, we must know what a and b mean, which in the case of a and b being names, means that we must know what they refer to. Hence, if we assume that we know what ?(a = b) means, we must also assume that we know the answer. Hence the query ?(a = b) can never be used significantly, which implies that both the positive answer, a = b, and its negative counterpart, a # b, are not meaningful either. This consequence, that identity sentences are necessary, is turned from vice into virtue in Kripke’s influential work on names and identity. See Kripke 1980. Of course, other options are also available, one being an analysis in terms of individual concepts, along the lines of Frege’s analysis in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1892a). For Wittgenstein this option is not available when it comes to names

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  eBook - ePub

  Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus

  • Pasquale Frascolla(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  which clearly do not assert the existence of a contingent situation and which, for this very reason, should be condemned as nonsensical pseudo-propositions. Needless to say, proposition (3) is representative of the whole huge class of mathematical propositions, all destined, as it seems, to the same inglorious end as propositions (1) and (2).

  Apart from their shared property of not being contingent, propositions (1), (2) and (3) appear as rather heterogeneous one from the other. One of the tasks of the chapter will be to try to establish whether their status as necessary propositions can be traced back to some deeper characteristic that they all have in common. With this aim in view, it is useful to compare the propositions in question with other linguistic expressions that, at least apparently, also express necessary truths: that is, with tautologies. One of the central aspects of Wittgenstein's conception of logical truths is that they do not depict situations the non-existence of which is unthinkable. Take a Tautology like 'either it is raining or it is not raining'; it does not describe a complex situation, in particular a purported disjunctive situation, that would obtain in every conceivable configuration of the world. As has been clarified in Chapter 4 , by means of that Tautology agreement is expressed with both the obtaining and the non-obtaining of the one and sole state of affairs depicted by the (by hypothesis) elementary proposition 'it is raining'. Its distinctive property of being true, regardless of how things might stand, is not brought about by the fact that that proposition represents a complex situation which necessarily obtains, but by the fact that, in every configuration of the world, either the state of affairs of raining contingently obtains, or it (always contingently) does not.

  Excluding the existence of necessary facts is tantamount to excluding the idea that tautologies represent 'the logic of facts' (T 4.0312), but this negative conclusion does not exhaust Wittgenstein's view of the relationship between language and the sphere of necessity. The truth of 'either it is raining or it is not raining', regardless of how things might stand, is a circumstance whose origin lies in a characteristic which is common to all possible configurations of the obtaining and non-obtaining of states of affairs, which is to say is common to all conceivable configurations of the world. A proposition expressing agreement with both the obtaining and the non-obtaining of the state of affairs of raining could be made false only by a configuration of the world in which neither of them were to be the case, and this is impossible given the way possible worlds are constructed out of logical space.1 A property that the actual world shares with all other possible worlds is called by Wittgenstein 'a formal property', or 'a logical property', of the world. Obviously, a complex proposition like 'either it is raining or it is not raining' says nothing about that property, does not depict that trait which is common to all possible configurations of the obtaining and non-obtaining of states of affairs; its very being tautological, however, rests precisely on that common trait. By generalization, it is the fact that a certain linguistic construct possesses the semantic property of being tautological, or alternatively the semantic property of being contradictory, that proves that the world possesses a certain corresponding formal property, or, by introducing another key-word of the jargon of the Tractatus , that shows a logical property of the world: 'The fact that the propositions of logic are tautologies shows the formal — logical — properties of language and the world' (T

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