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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?

Comments

  1. I do not see logic chopping in any of these examples. The question with respect to each of them is empirical: Do the advocates in each case in fact define the key term in the manner in which they are accused? If they do, then they are engaged in tautological reasoning.

    Darwinists don't; Stephen Jay Gould explained why in an essay in "Ever Since Darwin." You can address the opponents of market efficiency better than I, but I assume that they don't either. Those who argue that God is necessary for morality, however, do use the definition you state. I cannot cite you an example of one who does, but there would be no other way to reach the conclusion that God is necessary for morality.

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  2. It seems, by the way, that it is irrelevant to Christopher's point that those who argue that God is necessary for morality also argue that his being necessary for morality requires us to postulate his existence.

    In my prior comment, I said that there is no non-tautological way to reach the conclusion that God is necessary for morality. I see, though, that someone might (in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary) argue that people who do not attribute morality to God either are not moral or have no reason to want to be moral. Though it is false, that argument is not tautological.

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