Looking back, years later, my friend, Mohammad Abd-Rabbo, the Palestinian linguistics professor, said this was the most boring and useless class in his entire career. I give him some credit because Tautology, my subject, can be understood as meaninglessness itself, and also because Symbolic Logic can draw one into incomprehensible thickets of technical noise with a gradually-approximating-zero signal to noise ratio. On the other hand, Aristotle's syllogistic, itself, the basis of Greek, Roman, Arabic, and medieval logic, is both mere tautology and a thicket of technical noise enabling, with difficulty, formal and correct, non-trivial and bulletproof, reasoning. As I show here.

But if you will be patient, I hope you will soon find traction, and an accessible easy path to true insight, from which you start to see vistas opening. Many vistas, for science, and for yourself.

I'm arguing for a somewhat unfashionable, but radically ambitious view of logic. I will shoehorn this view, using the slogan "H" for H Notation, onto various topics like evolution, psychology, and human evolution, hoping to favor simplicity, understandability, and true insight, in all these fields. So put your seat belt on.

My first Penn phonetics professor, Leigh Lisker, told me, The less you say, the less you lie: the less you are wrong. At the time I thought he was telling me to shut up, but later realized it was more than and different from that.

Tautology is just repeating yourself. As in 1 = 1. Simple. Nothing to it. Yes, on the one hand, tautology says nothing. On the other hand, look: it cannot be denied!

It is like the water way of the Tao, it is has no more substance than an imagined cloud, and yet it is more powerful than rock, or steel, unbreakable. It is trustworthy, for the patient. But these enthusiasms are for you to discover, not for me to say, or sell.

I believe: Logic, math and 1=1 are not functions of time; they are true before and after now, before and after any now, before the now of the first beginning at the big bang and after now of the final end in the universal maximum-entropy dissolution. Before and after the origin of life, and irrespective of any mind that knows it or doesn't know it. Describe some process today, with truth, irrespective whether an instance of it occurred yesterday, today, or tomorrow your description IS, WAS, WILL BE true; define something today, your definition applies outside time, to things your eyes do see or will see but also to things in the past you can never see again. Tautology is automatically true; and truth is outside of time.

Does not the same argument apply to life and physics and everything? Was life possible before life happened? Yes it was, otherwise it couldn't have. Do the laws of physics, where they are universal and true, that is, which are merely definitional, describing tautological logic amongst terms, do these laws not apply outside of time itself, and therefore also inside of time and therefore before, during, and after the Big Bang and everywhere in the universe? Yes, that's what universal means.

Abstraction in nature

Okay then, yes, if you have a general mechanism in nature, it IS itself an abstraction, by definition because of its generality. Despite diversity, nature does happen to be full of similars and samenesses, of consistents and repeatables, and those are the parts and aspects that organisms, and we, are interested in and need to know or be able to control, being as we all are indeed organisms with, usefully, a will to power, that is, a will to the control of general mechanisms. So if we humans, as an evolved, social, teamwork type of species, have evolved to control and use an inventory or library of abstractions in a lexicon of signals that we can communicate to each other, that makes a lot of sense. Contemplate the opposite: for us to be unable to detect sameness, in general, would be quite the detriment to our capabilities, or to be unable to communicate them, that would limit our capacities for social achievement as well.

By these links, abstraction connects to reality on the one hand and lexicon on the other hand. I haven't, indeed, derived syntax from first principles, no, but animal cognition, and the cognitive capability to reason tautologically, to apply logic, I think we have enough here to connect them: abstractions, minds, and nature itself, in a tight circle of mutual dependency, if not perfect equivalence.

We happen to have the right kind of minds, we'll get to what that means later, but even alien minds must share logical reasoning.

Let's try an example. Two 90 degree rotations are the same, in a sense, as one 180 degree rotation. Does this depend on human cognition, or the words or sentence in which it is expressed? Does such cognition depend on or require a symbolic language to capture the insight as mathematical expressions? I say No; rather, cognition itself depends on, itself perceives, the logic itself, or some abstraction of physicality from which this logical equivalence is derived.

My purpose will be to deconstruct logic into tautology, then expand this reliable zone of perfect understanding out from there.

Formal Logic as Tautology

• Take negation. A != NOT A (we like our symbols, so we will write A ≠ ¬ A) seems like one expression but it says the same thing twice. Something that is NOT A, well, that is not (equal to) A. H. Have we repeated ourselves again. Not exactly, perhaps not entirely, yet certainly in some important essence, we have said the same thing twice. We operationalize this in the truth table, T for true, F for false, and all the conceiveable possibilities each in a different row.

  A	¬A	¬ ¬A
  T	F	T
  F	T	F

• Take double negation. A == NOT NOT A. Indeed, in logic, A is an expression of, in a way, all those circumstances in which A is true. And NOT A is the opposite, and the opposite of the opposite is the original.

  Cuteness is evoked. To read your back, look in two mirrors, no longer the (single-mirror) opposite of yourself. See your hair parted on one side in the mirror? Have you gotten used to seeing yourself that way? That's the opposite of what others see on you. Others would be surprised to see you as you do, oppositely. Opposite of opposite orients finally as the same orientation you started with. Like double negation.

Back to logic, everything logical about A is retrieved, after converting A to NOT A, by converting NOT A to NOT NOT A. So A == NOT NOT A. This is how logicians think; it's called the law of the excluded middle, asserting that there's no in between thing that's neither A nor NOT A. Based on that, A == NOT NOT A follows.

Here's the shocking lesson I want to draw. If B = NOT NOT A (== A), then NOT NOT B == NOT NOT NOT NOT A. In fact there's no limit to the number of equivalent expressions, (NOT NOT)^N A, for all N (N ∈ nonnegative integers). This is quite curious, quite general, quite basic. It's a basic consequence of the separation in the linguistic Sign between the represented and the representation, between the sign and the signified. There's one thing conceptually in your understanding, and there's an infinity of equivalent expressions for that one thing which could potentially be written down that are logically identical.

This is the trap of linguistic gamesmanship, and the problem faced by those who think the expression is equivalent to the intended idea behind that expression, those who confuse Symbolic Logic, for example, with Logic. In different ways, expressions can capture insights about ideas, even reliable insights about ideas, but there is no such thing as the unique correct expression of an idea. (Kolmogorov suggests we look instead for the shortest correct description; that's helpful, though it assumes a mystery representational context, which might not be known or available.)

We may start at an inner concept or understanding at the mental/cognitive/semantic level where in our insight-holding, perhaps Kolmogorov-simple, minds, a humanly-understood true idea actually exists as the one thing it is. Then we may draw that out into an externalized form as an expression that captures some communicable essence thereof, in which we seem to have lost uniqueness, entered the zone of blather, the forest of multiplied equivalences, we have started to confuse ourselves with tree after tree of tautological correspondence and derivation. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes not. Simplicity of form, and evoked inner insight, are valued here.

I want you to draw this lesson: the idea is the thing, not its expression. Even though expressing an idea, in one way or another, is the only way we can communicate it to someone else. (Possible exception: those ideas which are somehow previously shared by nature or nurture into the heads of sharers, and arise relevantly in shared contexts.)

Now we examine Symbolic Logic, which is of current fashion ever since Frege in the 1880's. In Symbolic Logic, we assert various Forms or Symbols as expressions of Logic along with matching sets of Rules whereby given one or more expressions that may include those symbols, it is permitted to write additional expressions; this is called formal reasoning because a text editing computer algorithm could implement the rules correctly. The forms would be: T(rue), F(alse), ¬ → ∧ ∨ ∀ ∃ and not too many more. (If we go back to Aristotle, then add 'a', 'e', 'i', and 'o', and 19 syllogistic moods a.k.a. methods, all of which are tautological as I have shown; much simpler than the reader might initially believe.)

But don't be fooled. The logical truths expressed in these various symbol systems are pulled back out of the page into our heads, or pulled out of one expression into a different equivalent one, the whole game being to find different, hopefully usefully different, expressions to mean the same thing, because sometimes we can reason ourselves into one expression or another, and so we need multiple different ones. (Which are the same.) It's Tautology, but that doesn't mean it's not Useful.

When you learn Symbolic Logic and see the insight of how two different expressions are the same, then you can store a rule of correspondence into your mental (or computational) library of equivalent correspondences, and pull them out in the process of trying out different derivations, wandering through the forest of expressions, possibly to find an expression of something that seems new and different.

Because some consequences are surprising, like the 100th prime number, we might be surprised to discover what it actually is, we maybe didn't know it in advance, even though in some kind of essence we did know it. We knew enough to derive it, by reasoning step by step, from counting to adding to multiplying to dividing, to checking a list against another list and finally coming to what had to be true tautologically that we didn't know before. Tautology, knowledge with complete certainty, as we draw out the web of knowledge more and more, yymight be quite surprising and previously unknown.

So here's more Symbolic Logic, and how very tautological it is.

• Take → for example. A → B is the same, logically, as ¬ A ∨ B.

  A	¬A	B	¬B	A → B	(¬A) ∨ B
  T	F	T	F	T	T
  T	F	F	T	F	F
  F	T	T	F	T	T
  F	T	F	T	T	T

• Take DeMorgan's Laws, for example, (NOT A) OR (NOT B) == NOT (A AND B), are just different formal or notational ways of stating the same identical truth table.

  A	¬A	B	¬B	A & B	¬(A & B)	(¬A)∨(¬B)
  T	F	T	F	T	F	F
  T	F	F	T	F	T	T
  F	T	T	F	F	T	T
  F	T	F	T	F	T	T

  The truth table expresses all possible combinations of true and false for the basic propositions A and B, so it can be used to reason over every possible case about derived propositions being true or false. If two expressions are the same as regards truth value in all possible circumstances, they are logically equivalent. Diversity of form does not imply diversity of meaning; different, even complex expressions can often reduce to the same thing. For example A = ¬ ¬ A = ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ A = ... may be extended without limit, preserving truth conditions. You might express a truth in one way, only to find other expressions equivalent, equally valid. Tautology licenses variety of expression.

• Take Modus Tollens, a.k.a. Modus Tollendo Tollens, The "Method of Removing by Taking Away". This is not quite as tautological as it sounds, at first, because it's removing P by taking away Q, which does seem to say something rather than nothing. But let's see if it doesn't reduce to a tautology even so. Modus Tollens says:

  1)   P⇒Q   given  2)   ¬Q   given  3)   ¬P  1,2, Modus Tollens

  , that is,

  P   Q  P⇒Q  T   T   T  Ruled out by (2).  T   F   F  Ruled out by (1).  F   T   T  Ruled out by (2).  F   F   T  The only remaining possibility.

  We consider all possibilities. Three are ruled out by the premises. The only one remaining, in which P⇒Q is true, and ¬Q is true (Q is false), is the last row, with Q false, and P also false. Therefore P is false given the premises. Indeed, the meaning of the premises, is restated in the conclusion, namely, that none of the first three rows holds, or to repeat, only the last row holds. The conclusion says nothing different from what the premises together say. Tautology. QED. H.

• Take Modus Ponens, the rule that from separate propositions, P⇒Q, and P, one can validly derive the proposition Q: this is the mere definition of the implication notation "⇒".

  1)	P⇒Q	given
  2)	P	given
  3)	Q	1,2, Modus Ponens

  We understand that the meaning of ⇒ is that its antecedent (P) "implies" its consequent (Q); but this isn't just a reference into the related truth table in some footnote; it actually justifies deducing from the antecedent to the consequent as a valid statement within a proof of logic, and as a necessary and true assertion in any conceivable world that satisfies the axioms of that logic. That is, "implies" has one meaning, operationalized in two ways (thus tautologically, as different forms of the same thing). After all, the context of interpretation of the truth table is the same context of interpretation as the derivation: if (P⇒Q) is true in that context, it MEANS that P actually implies Q, that finding P to be true (asserted in a proof) justifies inferring Q (asserting Q in the proof).

  Operationalized differently, as editorial computation, consider the truth table below, and the following numbered notes referenced in it: (1) the assertion, P⇒Q, crosses out the line of the P, Q, truth table in which P⇒Q is false. Next (2), the assertion, P, crosses out the two lines in which P is false (because by asserting P we deny that P is false), leaving one line in which P and P⇒Q are true, and in that line, that remaining alternative, (3) Q must be true. All alternatives having been ruled out, Q must be true.

  P	Q	P⇒Q
  T	T3	T
  T	F	F1
  F2	T	T
  F2	F	T

  These operations on the truth table lead to the assertion of Q, and that's why Q can be added to the derivation in the proof after P⇒Q and P. The sameness of truth in the truth table and in the formal proof is why Modus Ponens is tautological.

Newton's Tautological Reasoning

Now the clever bit is, he decided to relate weight (under gravity) to acceleration by a discovered, no, an invented, no, a proposed, a DEFINED scaling he called mass, by saying M≝W/A, where here '≝' sign indicates a DEFINITION, or as we write it W=M*A, where here the '=' sign rather conceals the definition in the equation. So in the context of terrestial objects, it was already a tautology to start with, the definition of the mass of a thing is its weight divided by its acceleration (under gravity). The idea is, if you take the movement out of the weight, you get a degree of non-movingness, of deadness, or unreactiveness, or uninfluenceability, a quantity of resistance to acceleration, that is its mass. So far so good, so pleasant, so firm: we believe it because you can define anything you want, and it'll always be true by definition, in its imaginary definitional world. One can imagine how he was diddling around idly with the units for different kinds of things, and making up imaginary relationships to see where they lead, a formal game of units manipulation under the rules of tautological definition-making.

But today we stand in awe of this quite especially useful definition, we call it Newton's amazing universal Second Law of Motion, that miraculously seems to apply equally throughout the universe, not just to an apocryphal apple bonking dear Isaac on the head in about 1666, but also over there, out to our planets, far out to other stars, and down inside here also even to molecules and atoms, and in time from the first beginning to the last end, or beyond. Was Newton's miracle the empirical universality of this law? Or was it just a definition, where as we know a definition is necessarily universal?

It is universal because it is a definition, which is to say, a tautology. Because of course M is DEFINED as F/A (in the context of gravity F=W; that is, an object's weight is the force it exerts being pulled down by gravity). A definition holds conceptually, that is, outside of time and the mind that conceived it: as a tautology, it asserts nothing, and saying nothing, it cannot be false, it is everywhere and always undeniable, true. It is like a perspective, come over here and look at it this way, then you'll see how things line up in this view. Every perspective is true; it's not the perspective that can be false but well or ill-observed conclusions of fact that may be drawn from viewing the world from that perspective.

So the miracle is not that F=MA is true, but that it is useful. Where gravity is disregardable, mass still is measureable by applying non-gravitational force and seeing how much is needed to push the thing around. Nowadays we think the concept of mass that Newton defined into existence is as real as, or more real than, the measurements he started with to measure and define it. Flip a cognitive switch and mass becomes the primitive characteristic out of which complexities like force under gravity are built up, rather than the other way around. Think of it this way or that, however you find useful, the truth is it became true by tautology, by logic, the queen, the king of science, before and after, outside time itself. Tautologus Rex.

Plato awakes.

• Similarly (logical) possibility is different from and precedes (in time and outside of time) both realization-in-reality and realization-in-subjective-conception. (See above w.r.t. ecological niches.

My problem is penmanship. I suck at it, and I hate it. I have to re-write the whole equation all over and then over again when all I did was another tiny substitution of some part of it with something equal to that part of it. Maybe it's a very long equation, and maybe I have three or four parts to substitute, or maybe some parts get substituted time after time. And it makes for a lot of stupid, stupid work doing copying, when the only thing I really need to re-write in full is the last version at the end, when I want to talk about that one. So instead I just use what I call H-notation: It's a Lazy Equals sign (remember "Lazy" applied to a cow brand means a 90 degree rotation), an H.

H-notation is just my way of writing an equals sign vertically. It's not a curly brace! Curly braces suck: they are SO hard to draw attractively when large, or with economy of space on the page. Curly braces have a different, more vague, meaning. Curly braces pick something out for a generic comment, like circling something. The comment might or might not be a substitution of something equal to the marked bit, whereas H-notation means equality. Just because it's Lazy, it's still an equals sign. Just because it's partial, it refers to a part of an expression, it still asserts equality between the above and below subexpressions that it connects.

Here: Draw a super-wide H below the part you want to say something about, and write what is equal to that part below the H.

 ...   A   ...
     |---|
       B

Thus H-notation lets you substitute equals for equals within any expression or equation.

  F     =  m  *         a
|---|            |------------|
  Fg               32'/sec/sec

You can use H-notation as often as you want on either side of the equals sign, and you can do it in columns too.

I find that about half of my math homework problems go away, when I don't do the recopying and just use H notation. Try it, you'll like it!

Incidentally, the way real mathematicians seem to solve this is to skip or hide all the step-by-step reasoning and substitutions, and just write the last equation. If you ask them they say that part is "obvious". Because it's job security for them, you see, the more obscure the reasoning is, then the harder everyone has to work to keep up with them, and then they seem to be so much smarter than everyone else. That method works in a bunch of professions, like law, medicine, and even plumbing. But I think it's obnoxious, especially when you're teaching, and math is (or should be) nothing else but teaching people. Write it down, see what comes out, that's how you actually teach yourself, and that's how you also teach others. Surprise! Language works! Who knew!

Dearie, we never told you this but Grandma Della had a secret baby named Robert with that roughneck Joe Smith before she met and got married to Grandpa Fred and had Helen and Fred Junior and John. But Grandma never told Grandpa she had a boy already, and made Joe raise him on the other side of town. So then Bob grew up and met your Aunt Helen, and fell in love and asked her to marry him. But after we explained the facts, she told him No. Because Bob's your uncle.

Tautology and its Uses

   A
 |---|
   A

Tautologies are statements that are true automatically. If something is true by definition, like The sky is above or The earth is below, then they don't actually say anything. Of course it's true: Duh!

Actually it's not duh!, you can discover things that are very surprising using tautological reasoning, or H notation, or mathematical substitution, for example that those three things are the same thing.

You philosophers will recognize H as a Kantian analytic judgement: the consequent is contained in the antecedent, as contrasted with synthetic judgements in which the consequent contains something more that is added to the antecedent.

Axioms provide supposedly solid ground (you have to evaluate them to see if you believe them, yourself) which then let you reason about stuff.

Sets of axioms together define the logical basis of domains of math or knowledge such as geometry or number theory, etc.

Sets of axioms compete to be the minimal set of axioms from which the knowledge in some topic can be derived. (See my essay contra Hilbert Negative Dimensionality, for a list of redundant and excessive geometrical axioms which, I point out there, can be reduced and simplified.)

Sets of axioms fail when they are found to be mutually inconsistent. Inconsistency is when you can derive both a proposition and its negation, within the system. For example, Schopenhauer destroyed Hegel's philosophy when he proved that any proposition and its opposite could be derived from accepted axioms using canonical, correct procedures of Hegelian reasoning.

Veatch's Conjecture: I have long thought that the same as Schopenhauer did to Hegel could be done to the deep abstractions combined with standard structuralist methodology as used in theoretical syntax and phonology in the field of Chomskyan linguistics. I conjecture as follows: Any assertion about a deep abstraction in formal linguistics might be proven, including its opposite, by using the standard structuralist methods while simply modifying enough supporting assumptions about the meaning of other elements of assumed theory so that that assertion can be made to follow consistent with the data. It was this apparent freedom of conceptual replacement of basic ideas with their opposite which I observed on the part of great formal linguists like Paul Kiparsky, which repelled me from those subfields of linguistics. In syntax and phonology in particular, the distance between the abstract primitives of theory and the concrete actual observations is so very great. If any assertion, inclusing its opposite, may be derived from the same set of facts using this method, then nothing is trustworthy, there, all is pointless. This might force such linguists to make fewer assumptions in their various theoretical approaches.

1.	A ∧ ¬ A	Assume any contradiction, both A and ¬ A
2.	¬ A	Definition of ∧.
3.	¬ A ∨ B	Definition of ∨.
4.	B	(2) and (3) and definition of ∨.

Definition. A definition is an Axiom that asserts substitutability of two expressions. It is really a domain-specific rule of inference; given a definition A ≝ B, and an expression ...A..., you may infer ...B.... A definition is like a perspective. If you look at something from a certain perspective, such as using a different label for that thing, which might free you from non-essential connotations and let you see a deeper insight, maybe you can have a simplified understanding of things which could be complicated without that definition.

For example, using polar coordinates, radius R and angle Theta, is a different way of thinking about the same geometrical things as using Cartesian, rectilinear coordinates X and Y. You can define R 𕌍 sqrt(x^2+y^2) and theta ≝ arctan(X/Y), and for some purposes everything will be simpler, like understanding systems of gears, like bike gears or automobile transmissions, where rotation is more important than translation in the X or Y dimension, for example.

Often a definition gives a simple name to a complex configuration. This will give you mental rest and an easier time of representing that configuration as part of even larger and more complex configurations. Chomsky refers to this as "Merge" when used on the fly in the creating and understanding of complicated sentences. "The pitcher who blah blah blah pitched to the batter who blah blah blah." There can be a lot of detail in the blah blah blah part, but you get reason with your limited mental capacity at different levels first by submerging the details in the higher level relationship, and once you have that squared away, you can descend into the details, and then all the things that were said in the complicated sentence, you can have thought about in some comprehensive and easy order, so that you can end up thinking very complicated thoughts after all. Definitions provide this service in a general and reuseable way.

Definitions can be bad in two senses. First, in the context of a set of axioms a given definition might produce inconsistency in reasoning, which would throw the whole system in the garbage, so definitions, like axioms, should be carefully constucted to prevent inconsistency. Second, they may not be useful, because they don't have traction in the current conceptual world, or the real world; they might not make things simpler after all. "Witchcraft is defined as magic carried out by a witch or warlock" might make the world more complicated after all, and might not be that useful when you think about it and draw out what it means when combined with everything else you think you know. But some might enjoy imagining imaginary worlds in which an otherwise useless, tractionless, world-complicating definition provides a key, titillating, even merely fun perspective within that imaginary world.

I'm saying that a definition cannot not wrong or false. It is just a perspective in the universe of all conceiveable worlds. It might be a bad definition, producing inconsistency or complication rather than traction, simplicity, and insight, but if you want to take that perspective, who will deny your right to self-contradiction, to superstitious bullshittery. On the other hand, we value useful definitions, which are consistent with the rest of what we know, and help us to reason about things.

Observation. An observation is, let's say, an observed actual event reduced to a linguistic description or characterization of that event. Observations transmute the rich sensory reality experienced by a perceiving observer into one or another limited classification, perhaps in multiple categories. Observation becomes data in the abstract, but it is tied to reality through the sensory and classification capabilities of the observer. Here's what's new. Statements about observations might be true or false. So far nothing can be false. But observational statements might be true or false. We hope we can trust an observer, for the time being we assume the observation is true as stated. But they could have lied, and it could in principle have been otherwise: the event observed might have occurred differently for any reason in or out of the screen of our knowledge or recording. Reality being the mystery that it is, observations could be wrong. In the world of observation is the world of empirical truth and falsity.

Tautology. But there is another kind of truth, which is the undeniable, non-empirical, truth of tautology. When a tautology is asserted, we say, Of course, it cannot be otherwise. Because P = P no matter what P is, we are persuaded.

For a child who doesn't have conservation of number, 8 is not 8, but sometimes it is 12, just like for Dad's dog, treats are numbered (and complained about) as 0, >0, where if Dad's other dog has 3 and it only has 2, there is no complaint, but as soon as Ralph has 0 and Princess has 1 (or more), it's time for a fuss. So we constrain ourselves to the knowledge (capable of being known) by the particular knower, within their capacities of knowledge, and we still say that P = P, once we have the right category set (where 8 for the child without conservation of number is replaced by >3, or whatever they are able to correctly reason with). In this way, definitions for those trying to understand us must be within the cognitive capacities of the audience.

Modulo this, tautology is indeed always true. It is not exactly empirical truth, because it doesn't come from particular observation. But it has the solidity, the satisfaction of trustworthy persuasion, when we see that some communicated essential idea is just a different way of saying the same thing. A complex argument becomes persuasive if its steps have the force of tautology, the force of obviousness.

Conclusion

What is science? Is it having statistical support for an assertion? It is a well-designed experiment? Yes, those, true, but science is reliable, useful, that is, trustworthy knowledge: true insight. What we want is the true insight. Not the P value, or the N, or the particular statistical distribution or model or test. And it's a combination of observation and logic, the supported, tautology-hard combination of axioms, definitions, rules of inference, and chains of reasoning, that bring us trustworthy insight, truth.

So I conclude by pointing out that in all kinds of areas of human knowledge, this applies. Logic is not a mere isolated and boring technical field, but a universal and encompassing system. Logic is what we use in cognitive science to prove insights which other sciences are too timid and logically unequipped to assess. If observation can be brought to bear within a system of logic on a question, more can be known than we might have thought.

I say so again in the other essays in this sequence of essays. I apply this aggressively to evolution, to biology, to the development of intelligence and language in humans, to the hierarchy of all knowledge. In a surprising number of cases, the truth is inevitable because it is tautology-hard, and what seems to be unknown or mere speculation, because one kind of direct observation is not available, still conclusions can be arrived at which are strong, reliable conclusions, using reasoning which is unquestionable, undeniable, where simple trustworthy insight is obtained by just taking the right perspective on what we do know, and following what is obvious to its necessary conclusions which might be far from obvious.

Mohammad, have I set you on the mountain? Have I opened vistas to you? I hope I have pulled you from boredom and technical mental strangulation in the Symbolic Logic world and given you both power and rest, given you a path of true insight.

So empowered, read on, I invite you!

• Up: Life, Child of Logic (You too)
• This: Tautology: how saying nothing says everything true. H!
• Next:
  • Cognitive Biology: biology (and science generally) are cognitive science.
  • A Conceptual Archeology before and after the Sign