The patent-latent distinction: Grice on

In WoW:ii Grice refers to

Women are women

and

War is war

as _patent_ tautologies. The idea is that there is another class, the latent tautologies.

--- The issue has psycholinguistic complexities and goes to show some of the nonsense written by psycholinguists!

Consider B. F. Loar, a sensible philosopher, in Mind and Meaning (or Meaning and Mind, I forget -- Cambridge Studies in Philosophy).

Surely if a pirot thinks

( p v - p ) --> r & ( - q iff p)

and it turns out that it is a non-patent, i.e. a latent tautology, we shouldn't bother.

But we do.

A patent tautology is a sight to see. Indeed, some critics criticised (is this tautological?) Grice's use of 'tautology'. Witters after all uses 'tautology' for PROPOSITIONAL, rather than predicate-calculus, formulae. And "Women are women" may NOT be tautological, they claim, in a male-only universe.

Etc.