Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth
From: bkaz (bkaz__at_hotmail.com)
Date: 10/28/04
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Date: 27 Oct 2004 21:31:13 -0700
> In a frank discussion with Wolf Kirchmeir yesterday concerning whether
> tautologies constitute empirical evidence he took occasion to remind
> me quite candidly that tautologies are always true. And the moral he
> drew from this was that tautological truths can't be empirical because
> empirical observations are always problematic and tautologies are not.
>
> Then I got to pondering. It seemed a shame to have something that was
> always true and not be able to draw some useful information from it.
> Here was this beacon of universal truth, and we had no use for it. I
> understood that philosophers and scientists consider tautologies
> useless despite their universal truth. However, I decided that the
> final chapter on usefullness of the tautology had yet to be written.
>
> Let's suppose we have a tautology, any tautology. And we recognize the
> universal truth of that tautology. What conclusions can we draw from
> this?
>
> If a tautology is universally true, alternatives to the tautology
> cannot be true and must be universally false. And, further, this
> must be true of all tautologies.
>
> Consequently, everything including empirical evidence represents a
> tautology or it cannot be true and must be false.
>
> Thus any empirical observation which is problematic must represent
> part of a tautology. For example, three inches and not three inches or
> blue and not blue. These are empirical observations and form parts of
> tautologies or they cannot be problematic and must be false.
>
> In point of fact each part of a tautology is an empirical observation,
> and this is what we mean by an empirical observation despite the
> conventional interpretation of empirical observations as inherently
> problematic.
>
> Further each part of the tautology is subject to evaluation either in
> terms of problematic correctness or in terms of self contradiction. If
> either part of a tautology is self contradictory, it must be false and
> the other part must be universally true whether empirical in
> conventional problematic terms or not.
>
> In other words, even though tautoligies in themselves are not
> problematic and cannot represent empirical observations, the reverse
> is not true and empirical observations can and do represent parts of
> tautologies.
>
> And finally we conclude that all this must be true because the
> combination of tautology and not tautology itself forms a tautology
> and must always be true.
>
> Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.
>
> The tautology has finally proven useful after all.
I think you're confusing truth (correpondence to reality) with
consistency (correpondence to definitions). No question tautology can
be useful: all of math is a tautology, but is about mental economics,
not about truth.
> Regards - Lester
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