Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth
From: Lester Zick (lesterDELzick_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 10/28/04
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Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:45:28 GMT
On 27 Oct 2004 21:31:13 -0700, bkaz_@hotmail.com (bkaz) in
comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>> 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.
Not yet, perhaps. But if math corresponds to reality through tautology
drawn in terms of differences then it is universally true through the
inherent self contradiction of alternatives. Of course that remains an
open question at present.
Regards - Lester
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