Tautology

Tautology, in logic, a statement so framed that it cannot be denied without inconsistency. Thus, “All humans are mammals” is held to assert with regard to anything whatsoever that either it is not a human or it is a mammal. But that universal “truth” follows not from any facts noted about real humans but only from the actual use of human and mammal and is thus purely a matter of definition.

In the propositional calculus, a logic in which whole propositions are related by such connectives as ⊃ (“if…then”), · (“and”), ∼ (“not”), and ∨ (“or”), even complicated expressions such as [(A ⊃ B) · (C ⊃ ∼B)] ⊃ (C ⊃ ∼A) can be shown to be tautologies by displaying in a truth table every possible combination of truth-values—T (true) and F (false)—of its arguments A, B, C and after reckoning out by a mechanical process the truth-value of the entire formula, noting that, for every such combination, the formula is T. The test is effective because, in any particular case, the total number of different assignments of truth-values to the variables is finite, and the calculation of the truth-value of the entire formula can be carried out separately for each assignment of truth-values.

The notion of tautology in the propositional calculus was first developed in the early 20th century by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of the school of pragmatism and a major logician. The term itself, however, was introduced by the Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argued in the Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922) that all necessary propositions are tautologies and that there is, therefore, a sense in which all necessary propositions say the same thing—viz, nothing at all.

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Epistemology: Tautological and significant propositions

Wittgenstein’s use of the term requires its extension from the propositional calculus to the first-order predicate calculus (with functions), which can range over classes, sets, and relations as well as over individual variables (variables that may stand for individuals). That extended notion of tautology, further explained by the English logician Frank P. Ramsey in 1926, is in fact a less-precise forerunner of what is now usually called validity.

Later, certain logical positivists, especially Rudolf Carnap, amended Wittgenstein’s doctrine in the light of the distinction that there is an effective test of tautology in the propositional calculus but no such test of validity even in the lower predicate calculus. The logical positivists held that, in general, every necessary truth (and, thus, every tautology) is derivable from some rule of language; its only necessity is its being prescribed by a rule in a certain system. Because such derivations are difficult to perform in ordinary language, however—as with the statement “Whatever has a beginning in time must have a cause”—attempts have been made, as in Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928; The Logical Structure of the World: Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, 1967), to construct an artificial language in which all necessary statements could be demonstrated by appeal to formulas.