Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth
From: Lester Zick (lesterDELzick_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 10/30/04
- Next message: patty: "Re: Finding useful functions- part 1"
- Previous message: Lester Zick: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- In reply to: alan jones: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- Next in thread: patty: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- Reply: patty: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 15:55:24 GMT
On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 10:55:34 GMT, "alan jones" <ob2@freeuk.com> in
comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>> 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.
>
>'Alternatives to the tautology?' Do you care to explain what
>is meant by alternatives? This extract would seem to suggest
>a situation of either / or. Yet I would say its possible to have
>alternative language to describe the same truth, even a truth
>which encompasses the first without contradicting it.
Well, well. Someone has finally raised a pertinent issue, one which I
find somewhat perplexing. If a tautology excludes no possibility, the
only alternative to a tautology would have to be the one thing it
excludes, which is the "no possibility". Which I take to mean self
contradiction.
>"Lester Zick" <lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:4180992f.61813160@netnews.att.net...
>>
>> Tautologies and Empirical Truth
>> --------------
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Regards - Lester
>
>
Regards - Lester
- Next message: patty: "Re: Finding useful functions- part 1"
- Previous message: Lester Zick: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- In reply to: alan jones: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- Next in thread: patty: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- Reply: patty: "Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Relevant Pages
|
