 Trivial. Redundant. Dogmatic. Useless. That's what people really mean when they say, oh, your argument is just a tautology. Indeed, one of the quickest ways to dismiss an idea is to label it as tautological, and therefore empty of content. The standard philosophic position goes like this. Tautologies are merely true by definition and cannot teach us anything about the world. Well, I couldn't disagree more strongly with this line of reasoning. Not only is it mistaken to dismiss tautologies, it's completely backwards. For three distinct reasons, tautologies are foundational for critical reasoning. They are the building blocks for an accurate worldview. First of all, we need to understand what tautologies are and why they are so frequently dismissed. A tautology is a proposition that is true in all possible circumstances. Sometimes people say it's true by definition or self-evidently true. The central idea is that it has no possibility of being false. Consider the sentence, all fish are fish. Is there any possibility of that sentence being false? Well, no. Therefore, it's a tautology. If a fish is a fish, then it's a fish. There's no exceptions. If we abstract one degree, we can see the structure of the proposition. It's saying, all x are x. Well, clearly no possible x could ever not be an x regardless of what x is. So we might say this abstract proposition is true in all possible circumstances. But does it tell us anything useful? The standard criticism of tautologies goes like this. Because of the fact that tautologies are necessarily true, they don't tell us anything new about the world. They cannot possibly be wrong and therefore they do not add to our knowledge. They are redundancies and they ultimately do not even need to be stated. A fish is a fish is trivial and it doesn't tell you anything that you didn't already know. Some people have called tautological reasoning circular or claim that it's merely begging the question. But this is all wrong. Tautologies are arguably the most important propositions in all of philosophy. They cannot be dismissed without throwing out a foundational tool for critical thinking. The first mistake is simple. Not all tautologies are created equal. Some tautologies are trivial, it's true. A fish is a fish by itself doesn't tell you really anything useful. But some tautologies are far more profound. So here are the three major reasons why the conventional thinking regarding tautologies is flawed. First of all, most obviously, tautologies become important when people deny that they're true. In a very peculiar combination, many ideas get dismissed as tautological while simultaneously being denied as true. The logical law of identity, for example, is foundational that A is A or a thing is a thing. And yet huge numbers of people deny that that's true. In an ideal world, I suppose the law of identity might never need to be stated because it's self-evident. But that's not the world we live in and huge swaths of people deny the truth of the law of identity. I call these people irrationalists and they usually appeal to the liar's paradox or flawed interpretations of quantum physics to justify their rejection of the law of identity. But the same phenomenon happens in economics. As I will explain in the future, the foundations for sound economic theory are logically deducible. They are necessary truths about the meaning of our concepts that all follow from the same premise that, quote, humans act. And because that theory is tautological, people are quick to dismiss it as, oh, well, it's trivially true. Yet in the same breath, those people will turn around and deny the truth of the tautology by arguing for price floors or ceilings in the case of economics. Well, you can't have it both ways. If the tautology is trivially true, then it mustn't be denied. If it's denied, then it's obviously worth restating. Second, and this is fairly heretical to orthodox philosophy, tautologies can actually teach us something new about the world. Lots of things, in fact. Consider an idea I wrote in an article entitled The Metaphysics of Logic. Even if an omnipotent God exists, he certainly did not create the laws of logic. Those laws bind everything in existence, without exception, including any omnipotent God. This conclusion is not hypothetical. It's logically necessary and tautological. Yet billions of people on the planet likely believe otherwise. A standard theological position is to say God created everything, including the laws of logic. But this is mistaken. Understanding why God could never create logic is neither trivial nor redundant. It's new information that can only be revealed after a deliberate exercise in logical reasoning. It tells you something new about the universe that you wouldn't know otherwise. Or consider an even larger set of truths, mathematics. Mathematics is fundamentally tautological. The equation 2 plus 2 equals 4 is true in all possible circumstances, given the meaning of our terms. Yet nobody would conclude, therefore, mathematics is useless and it doesn't tell you anything about the world. Well maybe mathematicians would say that, but nobody outside of mathematics would say such a thing. Math can tell you all kinds of profound truths about the world and few things are more concretely practical than mathematics. And that's because those truths are fundamentally grounded in logical and tautological reasoning. So even though careful mathematical reasoning can lead to absolutely certain conclusions, it isn't merely self-evident. Consider the equation 962 times 2231 equals n. Go ahead and use simple logic to find the answer. Well of course it's not so easy. The answer is n equals 2,146,222 and it couldn't be anything else. Does that mean that the solution is trivial? Well of course not. Just because something is necessarily true doesn't mean that it's irrelevant or worthy of dismissal. And it certainly doesn't mean that somehow you can know the conclusion beforehand. So the third reason and perhaps the most important is if we grant that tautologies are necessarily true, all we have to do is ask a simple question. Why? Why are tautologies necessarily true? Why can you know with certainty that a fish is a fish? In other words, what gives tautologies their necessary quality? Now you might be tempted to answer, well it just has to be that way. And that's precisely correct. And that has to be trueness. I call that logic. And it is the absolute bedrock on which to build your entire world view. Every idea, every thought is built on top of this kind of logical necessity. So not only are tautologies useful, they point to the very foundations of our epistemology. Nothing is more important or fundamental for somebody interested in the truth. Tautology puts the tautologicalness into tautologies. It's what all self-evident truth appeals to. It's why propositions can be true by definition. And one more confusion I want to clarify. Some people insist that tautologies are useless because they are examples of circular reasoning. Or sometimes it's more precise they called begging the question. Now colloquially, circular reasoning is where you assert your conclusion as a premise. So for example, Judy is the tallest girl in the class because she's the tallest girl in the class. Well this proposition merely states its conclusion as a premise. To some this might look like a tautology. A because A. But crucially it's not actually a tautology. There's an obvious circumstance and when that conclusion is false. If Judy is not actually the tallest girl in the class. It's a possibility which doesn't entail any logical contradiction. And that's what differentiates circular reasoning from tautologies. So contrast the proposition Judy is the tallest girl in the class because she's the tallest girl in the class. With the proposition all of the students in class are students. Now this is a proper tautology. There's no possible circumstance in which it isn't true given the meaning of our terms. And that means that negating the conclusion would imply a contradiction. I.e. that some of the students in class are not students. So no, tautologies are not circular. They're simply true in all circumstances. Or you might say they are not false in any circumstance. But being necessarily true is a very poor reason to dismiss an idea as trivial or redundant. It's a grave error to overlook the usefulness and profundity of tautologies. Not only should we examine them, we should embrace them and incorporate them into the foundations of our ideas. Discovering tautologies is exciting and it's literally synonymous with discovering the truth. It's discovering the meaning and the implications of our own concepts. And not to mention any sound deductions which follow from tautologies are also necessarily true. So if we construct theories that are founded on necessarily true premises, we can build a robust worldview that is justified all the way down to its foundations. To learn more about my books, check out stevedashpatterson.com