Smoke Break

With the anarquistas, Barcelona 1936:

cigars

which they lit

from lengths of  dynamite fuse

-- Cyril Connolly, “Barcelona” (1936), in The Condemned Playground (1927-1944; repr. 1985), p. 191

Informative tautologies (updated)

Technically, for a logician, or a semanticist of the Snow-is-White school, tautologies convey no information;  but to linguists and pragmaticians, in context they often do.  In fact, we may state that they usually do, since otherwise why utter them?  “Business is business” is flint-hearted;  “Boys will be boys”, tenderly exculpatory.

The opposite of an utterance that pretends to contain no information (and thus, in particular, to be inexpugnable) but actually does (and often of a trenchant sort), is a definition that, ex cathedra, is all about informing, but which melts to the touch.  Cf. our essay here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/01/pugnaciously-vacuous-definitions_24.html

~

Covertly vacuous uses of technical-sounding terms  have been scouted in histories of science.  As, “Things fall because of gravity, and rise because of levity.” Or Molière’s virtus dormitiva.  But more may be packed into such terms than may be initially apparent.  As, one philosopher pointed out that “The ball rebounded to the height that it did  because of its resiliency.”  But this is informative:  the height is owing to internal characteristics of that ball, rather than from the ball’s having been dropped from a greater height, or having been dropped on a more resilient surface.

Additionally, the initial tautological character of a sentence can  so to speak  “age off”, in accordance with semantic evolution of its terms. Thus, “Atoms are indivisible” was initially as circular as “Bachelors are unmarried”, since they were defined from the outset as indivisibilia (as their name, a-tom, etymologically implies).  But on its current interpretation, the sentence would qualify as false.

A mathematician looks at Newton’s Definition 1, in the Principia:

Quantity of matter is a measure of matter that arises from its density and volume jointly.

Great acumen is hardly needed to realize that this definition is hopelessly circular, since density is normally defined as the ration of mass to volume;  but Newton’s unhelpful phrase  does have some implicit implications.  For example, we expect the mass of an object to remain unchanged if we change its shape.

-- Michael Spivak, Physics for Mathematicians: Mechanics I (2010), p. 9

~

A 2015  example of the uses of tautology:

Robert Buissière on Médi1, re Presidential candidates:

Jeb Bush, frère de son frère,

et Hillary Clinton,  épouse de son époux.

As they stand, these are statements “analytic”; but we understand the import:  Jeb and Hillary got where they are today, largely owing to family association.

Cf. & contrast the common expression “He is his father’s son.”  Normally this means that he takes after his Dad, and not that he is getting any special favors from other people owing to that filiation.  To imply the latter, you might say “Daddy’s little boy” or something.  By contrast, the French phrases in the above context  do not imply that Jeb’s politics are a close match to Dubya’s, let alone that Hillary’s are a close match to Bill’s.

~

A bare tautology like “Business is business”, as a free-standing statement, invite contentful interpretation via a “Gricean implicature” (specifically, the Maxim of Quantity).   The following is a syntactically more complex case, there the tautology is embedded in a subordinate clause:

Ever since self was self, nature been keepin’ folks off of red-hot stoves.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

The meaning is:  Common sense has been extant  from time immemorial.  Operationally, the (tongue-in-cheek) interpretation is:  Go back and back in time, sampling as you go. For each sample-point, verify whether  “self = self” holds at that time; and if so, then evaluate “Common Sense is in effect? Y/N”.  The sentence, for all its folksiness, has a kind of philosophy-class spin to it; the moreso as “self = self” calls up First-Order Logic with Identity.

~

Stylistic appreciation

Usually there is a summary “That’s that” finality to tautologies, whether used informatively or not;  stylistically, they are bare-bones.  But consider this:

Herod:  The moon has a strange look tonight. … She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. … Does she not reel like a drunken woman?  She is like a madwoman, is she not?

Herodias:  No;  the moon is like the moon, that is all.

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

Here the barrenness of the pale white, plain round  far-floating body, is reflected in the unyielding tautological formula.

~

Enten-Eller

Philosophers have scribbled  much ink, and later worn out many a typewriter ribbon, and finally expended great bushels of pixels, discoursing upon the status of “logical truths”; such as, paradigmatically, the following:

            (I) Every man is either married or a bachelor.

(We simplify, since the matter is not really of interest; leaving out of account, for instance, the curious case of Schrödinger’s groom.)

It is agreed that such a sentence tells us nothing about the world, unlike that time-honored exemplar of informativeness,

            (II)  The cat is on the mat.

which has been so oft repeated. down the years, that said cat has achieved the immobility and timelessness of an Egyptian idol.  (Presumably the mat lies in a patch of sunlight, so why ever move?)

            And yet its affordances are quite different from those of another statement of the same logical form; say:

            (II) Every number is either even or odd.

For, although the sentence (I) does not perhaps baldly state anything substantive about the world, its presuppositions speak volumes.  For one thing, it gives us to understand that there is a sharply defined institution, Marriage, into which a man may enter or not; and that his resultant state is either-or. Even so much will give our Martian anthropologists  sufficient grist  for many turns of the mill.

~

The above are mostly individual linguistic parlor-tricks.  Much more generally, there is the matter of the status of the equations of mathematics.  A view put forward by the dessicated and ennervating tendency called formalist nominalist  maintained that, being mathematical, they are tautologies, and being tautologies, they are uninformative -- semantically vacuous.  Practical experience shows that doctrine to be false.  As a way to see how such equations manage to be informative, consider the number pi.

Pi can be defined, qualitatively, in a number of diferent ways, most familiarly as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to is diameter.  It  is, moreover, a Given of the invisibilia, woven into the fabric of the noöspheric pattern;  and -- crucially -- it can be reacher in a startling variety of precise quantitative ways, along this strand or that of the warp and the woof -- and the woorp and the wahf, along any of the dimensions of the multidimensional mathematical textile.   Pi is itself ever one, the peak of the Golden Mountain;  but the paths that climb to it are numberless.  It can be expressed as a definite integral; as an infinite continued fraction; as an infinite product; as an infinite sum; with many variations of each.  (Behold some of them at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi.)  That fact that any one of these equals π is informative and indeed amazing, for in effect each one constitutes hiking instructions -- a trail-map -- to the summit, each from a wildly different base-camp.  And each one of these infinitely intricate expressions  is equal to any other, in an equation which is as distant from tautological or uninformative as can be imagined.

~

[Update 13 May 2020]  An aborbing article by Evan Osnos, in the 11 May 2020 issue of The New Yorker, maps out the paths by which the Greenwich Connecticut  tennis-and-boating-club crowd  came to support Trump.  The notables of that town have a patrician heritage, in principle at variance with the flashy style of the vulgarian from the Bronx, but as one blue-blood testifies, his conversion came while witnessing an early speech by the candidate:  “He had that line that he would use: ‘Folks, we either have a country or we don’t.’ And I felt the chill .. I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God, this is a really good line.’

Apart from the formally tautological character of that line, it puzzles by its vagueness:  out of context, it is unclear what at all is being hinted at.  Presumably the line is a dog-whistle, a bit of Rorschach rhetoric from which the listener will extract whatever meaning he likes.

The line does nothing for me; but it does recall such successful political antecedents as “The business of America is business.”

~

[Update 14 May 2020] 

Some of you may be familiar with the British sport of trainspotting.  That may or may not be in accordance with current U.K. guidance on coronavirus lockdown.  But here’s a hobby you can practice in the safety and comfort of your own home:

Tautology-Spotting !

As:

Headline in this morning’s New York Times:

The People Behind the Counter Are People

Remember this the next time you order takeout.

That one recalls those sleep-inducing example-sentences from introductory logic class (All brave Athenians are Athenians).  But in this case, it has a punch, and the source of that punch is not logical but lexical.  For, people has a variety of senses;  from the neutrally classificatory

(a)  an instantiation of the species Homo sapiens, near-cousin of Pan troglodytes, sometimes known as “a forked radish”;

to the “pregnant sense”  (I phrase it freely)

(b)  an ensouled being created in the image of the Lord of Hosts, whom Christ died to redeem.

In the cited sentence, the first occurrence of the word people has the (a) meaning; the second occurrence, (b).

For more on perspectival semantics and pregnant senses, check out this essay:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2019/10/words-of-day-sublunary-postlapsarian.html

~

In all the instances above, tautology is used in its traditional logico-philosophical sense.  But technical terms sometimes get picked up by a wider audience, where their use may be lax.  Thus, the literary critic V.S. Pritchett, in his article on the novelist Anthony Powell, wrote:

Mr. Powell is excellent with the raffish…. I think the sententious irony succeeds. … It adds a very English flavor, either of comic tautology or deflation.

The sense of tautology is unclear here.  Perhaps it refers to mechanical repetition, a standard component of broad humor.

Blazing Solar Monostich

!! SUNSTRUCK !!

Strange Sightings in Argentina

Every morning

on the pampa highways

there were

dead

brown

owls

.

.

.

-- V. S. Naipaul, “Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Perón” (1991), 

  in  The Writer and the World (2002), p. 386

When is the Task Force not the Task Force?

In May 2020, with the coronavirus still raging, President Trump said he was ready to “turn the page on all that”, and announced that the covid Task Force that had been led (apparently at the bottom of a mine-shaft somewhere) by the Vice-President (whose name  escapes me at present, and shall continue to do so in future) was being “disbanded”.  (In the French press reports of the anouncement, this verb was rendered démantelé -- ‘dismantled’, which sounds even more alarming.)  That offhand ad-lib caused consternation, so he “re-spoke” himself (verb ©WoDJ 2020, All Rights Reserved).  He now states that the Task Force will continue "indefinitely" -- albeit with substitute members and different mission. -- The young reporter who was obliged to recount all this on NPR, noticed a certain “philosophical question” here, whether this would be the “same” task force or not.

The philosophical problem alluded to  is that of Continuity of Identity, with many ramifications ancient and modern.  We have touched on some examples in these posts:

  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/continuity%20of%20identity

Meanwhile, herewith a handful of miscellaneous quotations, illustrating the variety of concerns:

Simon Blackburn (Think (1999), p. 127) quotes the joke about Irish axe that had been in the family for generations, the head having been replaced three times and the helve six; and asks whether Theseus’ ship, rebuilt plank by plank over the course of the voyage until no original molecule remained, was the “same” ship; and if so, what if someone had saved all the discarded planks and built a replica, this with all the original molecules, was that the “same” ship as well.

.

A modern example, with wry phrasing:

The truck had been a Renault back in the twenties, but had become, over time, a collection of replacement parts  cannibalized from every sort of machine.

-- Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw (2008), p. 146

And with a quite different topology:

The Romans who traversed the plains of Hungary  suppose that they passed several navigable rivers .. but there is reason to suspect that the winding stream of the Theiss  … might present itself in different places  under different names.

-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788)

Of current concern among Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers:

Since these world-lines define the individuals we quantify over when we use modal logic (more accurately, when we ‘quantify into’ modal contexts), we do not have well-defined individuals at our disposal in any realistically quantified modal logic.

-- Jaakko Hintikka, “Quine on Who’s Who”, in Hahn & Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (1986), p. 210

The Quinean view:

view helps one appreciate that there is no reason why my first and fifth decades should not, like my head and foot, count as parts of the same man, however dissimilar.  There need be no unchanging kernel  to constitute me the same man  in both decades,  any more than there need be  some peculiarly Quinian textural quality, common to the protoplasm of my head and feet;  though both are possible.

-- W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (1960), p. 171

AMOREM LUDUMQUE CANO

Among the genres of popular fiction which I have never so much as sampled, whether from idle curiosity or prophylactic alarm, figures  not only the old-fashioned cowpoke tales (now perhaps extinct, in America if not in Europe), but the much larger and still thriving genre of what we may call the Harlequin romance.  Were I stranded in a railway carriage on a non-stop express from Berlin to Trebizond, with no companion but a deaf-mute retired parson, and no reading-matter but a Harlequin left behind by some previous passenger, I should tell that parson the story of my life, beginning with infancy,  clarifying the subtler points with hand-gestures, and proceeding through the Lehrjahre and the Wanderjahre and so forth;  or else I would read and re-read the posted railway regulations (“Non sporgersi!”), noting points of etymology and style;  or even (in default of any other exemplifications of the alphabet)  practice the farther reaches of the “times” table, alert to any possible number-theoretical surprises, --  before I would pick up that cardioid-bespotted object.

            And yet the following point obtrudes itself, as I read the umpty-seventh of P.G.Wodehouse’s innumerable, perhaps indeed literally numberless series of tales (in the Steady State Theory, a new one pops out posthumously every so often, as the universe expands):  that in any one of these tales  -- select at random as you like, from the early, late, or middle run of the oeuvre – if there figure a wholesome young woman, and a wholesome young man (typically denominated "Bill" and "Jane"), then, despite a heap of obstacles thrown up, both by Fate (abetted by the author’s art) and by their own respective fat-headednesses,   they will get betrothed. 

And this result, I acknowledge, is as welcome to me, as the crisp air at sunrise, the brandy after dinner, or the climax of the act of love. Yet it is exactly the same end which is repetitiously compassed by those distaff harlequinades (which, unaccountably, I persist in disdaining to savor).

            From the standpoint of modern geometry, there is but one possible conclusion: that, though I can never know hér mind, nor she know mine, yet we are gazing, from different angles, at the same real solid object – the same sacrament, given from heaven.

*

            These two light genres, whether or not twinned in Platonic paradise, could perhaps do with a dose of gravitas.  Herewith, therefore, two links to the classic past:

Firstly:  As Byron puts it in Don Juan: "Tragedy ends in death; comedy, in marriage." (The observation may perhaps go back to Aristotle.)

Secondly, concerning the Wodehouse golf series in particular: Though the martial note is muted in these tales, and though the ancient gods and heroes are here more likely to appear as something half-remembered from the sixth form, than as actual protagonists, yet there is an echo of the Iliad.  For as there, the warriors, pawns upon a board, might act as they would, by will or upon impulse, yet their shot shaft must suffer a crucial mid-air nudge from this interested deity or that one:  so too in Wodehousia, as the dim plus-foured figures potter tragically about the green.  For it is all very well for you to rummage among your armamentarium of brassies, drivers, mashies and niblicks – the full recital of which would take longer than the Catalogue of the Ships – be you ever so skillful or never so duff – this fact of the Fates remains:  that little round white metaphor of human destiny  will (Ulysses-like) at last reach the safe haven of the tin cup, or on the contrary (tel the lesser Ajax) land smack dab in a sand-trap, according as the favors of Aphrodite, or of her meddlesome son, have or have not been propitiated.  In the Wodehouse world, the best way to hole out under bogey is to propose marriage on the putting green, and be received.

Mauritian Monostichs

Bad Infinity

sugar cane  and    sugar cane,    

ending in the sea .  .  .

-- V. S. Naipaul,  The Writer and the World (2002), p. 108

Bad Light

A rainy Sunday afternoon,

overcast  yet full of glare,

and sticky  between the showers

-- V. S. Naipaul,  The Writer and the World (2002), p. 114