Concept
Tautology (language)
Overview
In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional. Intentional repetition may emphasize a thought or help the listener or reader understand a point. Sometimes logical tautologies like "Boys will be boys" are conflated with language tautologies, but a language tautology is not inherently true, while a logical tautology always is.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Similarly, it is a tautology to say that matter in its natural state has no exchange value, because it does not contain any labor, and that exchange value as such does not contain matter. But when William Petty calls “labor the father and earth the mother of wealth,” or when Bishop Berkeley asks “whether the four elements and man’s labour therein, be not the true source of wealth,”[7] or when the…
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Names Tautology twice; opens on Tautology.
And if the reader rebels at the iteration of such obvious tautology, I can only reiterate that the realization of the _meaning_ of this tautology is the key to the whole question of the objectivity of experience, as that stands to the empiricist. The lines of _that_ experience _are_ divergent; not merely _seem_ so.
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
States what Tautology is; names Tautology twice.
In the proposition, "Wine is good," it is understood with equal readiness, though for somewhat different reasons, that the assertion is not intended to be universal, but particular.[16]
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Tautology is.
Related ideas
- Auguste Comte
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Morpheme
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Psalms
- Rhetoric
- Volition
- Koine Greek
- Oxford University Press
- Literary criticism
- Penguin Books
- Pleonasm
Place in the tradition
Part of Paraconsistent logic.