{"id":10807,"date":"2011-03-30T13:45:28","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T13:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/03\/30\/hes-his-fathers-son-more-on-tautologies-that-aint\/"},"modified":"2011-03-30T13:45:28","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T13:45:28","slug":"hes-his-fathers-son-more-on-tautologies-that-aint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/03\/30\/hes-his-fathers-son-more-on-tautologies-that-aint\/","title":{"rendered":"‘He’s His Father’s Son’: More on Tautologies That Ain’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Riding my bike the other afternoon, it occurred to me that 'He's his father's son' is yet another example of a phenomenon I have noted before, namely, a broadly tautological form of words which is standardly employed to express a decidedly nontautological proposition.  Taken literally, in accordance with sentence meaning (as opposed to speaker's meaning) our example expresses something that cannot be false.  For how could a man fail to be his father's son?  As opposed to what?  His father's daughter?  But that is not what speakers typically mean when they utter the sentence in question.  They mean something that could be reasonably questioned, something like:  He is like his father in significant ways.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose the underlying phenomenon is the divergence, on some occasions, of sentence meaning from speaker's meaning.  Sentence meaning is the meaning a sentence has as part of the language system, English in our case.  Sentence meaning is at the level of sentence types.  Speaker's meaning comes in when a sentence type is tokened on a given occasion (whether in speech or writing, etc.).  by a speaker.  One then must consider what the speaker intended, and how he was using his words.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider 'beer is beer.'  Outside of a logic or metaphysics class no one would use this form of words to illustrate the Law of Identity.  The meaning is that all beer is the same.  For an extended discussion of this example, see my When is a Tautology Not a Tautology?<\/a>  But what about 'Men are men and women are women'?  As Seldom Seen Slim pointed out to me<\/a>, this does not express a conjunction of two formal identity claims. <\/span><\/p>\n

Remember "Let Reagan be Reagan"?  Was there need for a special allowance that Reagan remain self-identical?  Was there any danger that he might suddenly become numerically self-diverse?  <\/span><\/p>\n

Find more examples.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Riding my bike the other afternoon, it occurred to me that 'He's his father's son' is yet another example of a phenomenon I have noted before, namely, a broadly tautological form of words which is standardly employed to express a decidedly nontautological proposition.  Taken literally, in accordance with sentence meaning (as opposed to speaker's meaning) … Continue reading “‘He’s His Father’s Son’: More on Tautologies That Ain’t”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,408],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-matters","category-language-philosophy-of"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}