Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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.
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 .
Pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check; if a word is unknown, misunderstood, misheard, or if the medium of communication is poor—a static-filled radio transmission or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the meaning is communicated even if some of the words are lost. [citation needed]
Circular reasoning (Latin: circulus in probando, "circle in proving"; [1] also known as circular logic) is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with. [2]
Such a proof is again a refutation by contradiction. A typical example is the proof of the proposition "there is no smallest positive rational number": assume there is a smallest positive rational number q and derive a contradiction by observing that q / 2 is even smaller than q and still positive.
The tee (⊤, \top in LaTeX), also called down tack (as opposed to the up tack) or verum, [1] is a symbol used to represent: . The top element in lattice theory.; The truth value of being true in logic, or a sentence (e.g., formula in propositional calculus) which is unconditionally 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 ...