Three (alleged) Tautologies

The idea of a "tautology" and especially of its use in philosophical debate, has bugged me for years. Let me express my analytical (or synthetic) reaction here and see if I get an illuminating response.

Many of those who dislike the idea of evolution, or Darwinian evolution anyway, make a point about the nature of the alleged mechanism. The notion that evolution works by "the survival of the fittest" can not, they say, be a substantive insight at all because it is a tautology. The fittest are defined by survival, and then survival is attributed to their fitness. An obvious circle.

Likewise, those who dislike the notion of market efficiency make the same point, though they may not recognize its similarity. They say that the notion of efficiency is defined by what the market does, and then the market is said to be efficient. An obvious and invalidating circle!

Another example: those who argue that a God is necessary, and must be postulated even if His existence cannot be proven, because He serves as the foundation of moral behavior, are often accused of the same tautology (the Euthyphro circle, if you read your Plato). They define moral rightness as what God wants, then praise God as the upholder of moral rightness.

Isn't it the same argument in each of these cases? And isn't there a generic response? Because it seems to me intuitively that in EACH case the its-all-a-tautology folks are avoiding something important.

In either case, the advocates of a certain point of view have a certain difficult-to-define idea that is central to their beliefs: the suitability of organic adaptations, the optimality of a particular allocation of resources; the Goodness of God. Each is hard to define except in the way that gets them in trouble, opens them to the circularity accusation.

But in each case, the accusation looks like logic chopping.

Can anybody take this further?

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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