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, where
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”. If the answer is Yes each time, then the
corelation holds.
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.
[For the essay to which the above is an appendix, see this:
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