Tautology

A tautology is a tautological statement that is tautologous in nature. Why? Because we (tautologists) told you that because we told so.

“”The First Rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.
—xkcd[1]
Cogito ergo sum
Logic and rhetoric
Key articles
General logic
Bad logic
v - t - e

But seriously

A tautology is a statement that, by virtue of logic and nothing more, is true, but in such a way that it contains no useful information: "The red bicycle is red." Sometimes this can extend beyond simple logic to obvious definitional facts: "The red bicycle has two wheels."

Sometimes tautologies are hard to extricate and identify when they are buried in masses of argumentative prose. In other situations, it may be obscured by experimental design.[2]

One particular kind of tautology is "assuming the antecedent", also known as "circular logic". This is often engaged in by Bible thumpers, who will justify their argument with Biblical citations and take the Bible's own assertions as proof of its being true. A classic example of this, which one will ultimately run into in any lengthy discussion of the Bible with a fundamentalist Christian, is "I know what the Bible says is true, because the Bible says it is."

Formal definition

"given A (and whatever puffery is there to hide the fallacy), then (eventually) A".

Reduced to the statement "A implies A", this is actually the simplest form of tautology.

Legitimate uses

Tautologies can be useful for emphasizing important facts, or putting them in more useful forms. Tautologies can also be used as a starting point for some logical methods (in particular, most formal definitions of mathematics depend in part on the tautology "A=A" to help define the concept of mathematical equality). And naturally, any assumption that disagrees with a tautology is false.

gollark: Palaiologos palaiologically left a highlight on, yes.
gollark: Or maybe just accelerate them.
gollark: I wonder, did COMPARTMENTAL SLATS create the ongoing bee cascade events or merely act as a symptom of them?
gollark: With ubq permission.
gollark: Then someone removed the link because of inactivity or something.

See also
  • Begging the question

References
  1. Tautology Club xkcd.
  2. E.g., see How Tautological Are Interspecies Correlations of Carcinogenic Potencies? by David A. Freedman, Lois Swirsky Gold and Thomas H. Slone (1993) Risk Analysis vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 265-272 (archived from August 30, 2017).
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