In a message dated 1/19/2004 11:11:07 PM Eastern Standard Time,
frankie.roberto@ucl.ac.uk writes:
>My full essay available here:
>http://www.frankieroberto.com/articles/tautologies.html
>Thoughts and further references duly welcomed!
>Thank you for the comments and link. Interesting essay.
At
http://www.frankieroberto.com/articles/tautologies.html
you write:
'[t]autology' is a term borrowed from philosophy, where
it describes an argument in which the only possible truth
condition is 'true'. ... Tautological utterances pose a
question for pragmatics."
Indeed they do, if only, too, because Grice listed them within the "Group-C"
of his 'conversational implicature'-generating utterances. I note, however, a
feature of Grice's wording:
"Extreme examples of a flouting
of the first maxim of Quantity are
provided by utterances of _patent_
tautologies."
(WOW, p. 33, emphasis mine. JLS).
-- as opposed to _latent_, or -- better -- non-patent. This suggests that,
for Grice, there is an _epistemological_ (as it were) continuum that runs from
non-patent tautologies (it's not patently clear what he may mean here) to the
patent ones (the two famous equitive examples he gives, wuth plural and
singular copula respectively:
(1) Women are women.
(2) War is war.
-- i.e. 'patent' must be a _doxastic_ or _epistemic_ or somehow
'metarepresentational' (cognitive) category, I would think. Grice also implicates that
utterances of _non-patent_ tautologies_ would be _less_ extreme examples of a
flouting of the first maxim of Quantity?
You also write:
>['tautology'] describes an argument in
>which the only possible condition is true.
and you go on to give the example
(3) The sun will rise tomorrow or
the sun will not rise tomorrow.
-- cf. the White Knight's famous example discussed by Ramsey in _The
Foundations of Mathematics_:
(4) WK: Either the song will bring tears to your eyes
or else...
Alice: Or else what?
WK: Or else it _won't_, you know.
Now, strictly, your example (3) is tautological in that it is a _theorem_ in
*propositional* calculus -- as patently opposed to the two examples given by
Grice which are theorems in the *predicate* calculus, rather. More to the
point, they are theorems only in calculus -- unlike Dummett's -- which abide by the
Law of the Excluded Middle.
This leads us perhaps to the sometime overlapping class of _analytically
true_ utterances (like 'a bachelorette is an unmarried female', to use an example
from recent American television), and discussed under various guises by Grice
-- e.g. in his examples in 'In defense of a dogma':
(5) My neighbour's three-year old child is _not_
an adult.
-- as opposed to the _synthetically true:
(6) My neighbour's three-year old child does _not_
understand Russell's Theory of Types.
To complicate matters, within the controversial set of 'analytically true'
sentences there also seems to be a continuum from the doxastically non-patent to
the doxastically patent, when it comes to so-called 'meaning postulates' --
and as has been discussed by G. Sampson in _Making sense_ (Oxford, Clarendon)
in connection with the variability of speakers' intuitions regarding the
analyticity of utterances like (7) or (8):
(7) Spring follows winter.
(8) Christmas comes but once a year.
Cheers,
JL
J L Speranza
---- Refs:Grice, H. P. 'Logic and Conversation', in Studies in the Way of Words [WOW], Harvard, 1989. --- and P. F. Strawson, 'In defense of a dogma', in WOW. Higashimori, Isao and Wilson, Deirdre, 1996. Questions on Relevance: 3.3 Tautology. UCL Working paper in Linguistics 8. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/PUB/WPL/96papers/higashi.pdf Sampson, G. Making sense, Clarendon, 1981. Sperber, Dan. & Wilson, Dierdre, 1986. 'Postface' to Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Second ed., 1995: pp. 256-278 Sperber, D & Wilson, D, 1992. On verbal irony in Lingua 87: pp 53-76.
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