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‘That's that’; or some Uses of Tautology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Dorothy Emmet
Dorothy Emmet
Affiliation:
University of Manchester.
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Extract

Locke, in writing about ‘Trifling Propositions’ which bring no increase to our knowledge, remarked ‘When we affirm the said truth of itself, it shows us nothing but what we must certainly know before. What is this more than trifling with words? It is but like a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand to the other, and had he but words might no doubt have said “Oyster in right hand is subject and oyster in left hand is predicate”, and so might have made a selfevident proposition of oyster, i.e. oyster is oyster’.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 37 , Issue 139 , January 1962 , pp. 15 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1962

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References

page 15 note 1 Essay on the Human Understanding, IV, 8.

page 16 note 1 Mind XLVII. ‘Metaphysics and Verification.’

page 17 note 1 ‘Metaphysics and Verification’, Mind, XLVII, pp. 452ff.

page 20 note 1 Administrative Behaviour (New York, 1948).

page 23 note 1 101 Things by Peter Gammond and Peter Clayton, where ‘Things’ are illustrated in the guise of little dressed-up and animated potatoes, shows what multifarious roles they can play-as when they ‘are not what they seem’, or ‘what they used to be’, or when they ‘come to a pretty pass’. Indeed, as the authors justly remark, ‘It is amazing how these things get about’.