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In mathematical logic, a tautology (from Ancient Greek: ταυτολογία) is a formula that is true regardless of the interpretation of its component terms, with only the logical constants having a fixed meaning. For example, a formula that states, "the ball is green or the ball is not green," is always true, regardless of what a ball is ...
In propositional logic, tautology is either of two commonly used rules of replacement. [1] [2] [3] The rules are used to eliminate redundancy in disjunctions and conjunctions when they occur in logical proofs. They are: The principle of idempotency of disjunction:
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". [1] [2] Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. [3] Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when
For example, the rule of inference called modus ponens takes two premises, one in the form "If p then q" and another in the form "p", and returns the conclusion "q". The rule is valid with respect to the semantics of classical logic (as well as the semantics of many other non-classical logics ), in the sense that if the premises are true (under ...
Tautology may refer to: Tautology (language), a redundant statement in literature and rhetoric; Tautology (logic), in formal logic, a statement that is true in every ...
The connectives are usually taken to be logical constants, meaning that the meaning of the connectives is always the same, independent of what interpretations are given to the other symbols in a formula. This is how we define logical connectives in propositional logic: ¬Φ is True iff Φ is False. (Φ ∧ Ψ) is True iff Φ is True and Ψ is True.
However, the term tautology is also commonly used to refer to what could more specifically be called truth-functional tautologies. Whereas a tautology or logical truth is true solely because of the logical terms it contains in general (e.g. " every ", " some ", and "is"), a truth-functional tautology is true because of the logical terms it ...
Tautological consequence can also be defined as ∧ ∧ ... ∧ → is a substitution instance of a tautology, with the same effect. [2]It follows from the definition that if a proposition p is a contradiction then p tautologically implies every proposition, because there is no truth valuation that causes p to be true and so the definition of tautological implication is trivially satisfied.