In this post, I fail to spend even twenty seconds searching google scholar for linguistics articles about tautologies. What a waste of time, recapitulating a trivial subject.
When people say "It is what it is," they're halting their negative affective valuations of the status quo, for lack of a foreseen exit ("I am what I am," and "Boys will be boys (regardless of your interventions)," have much the same character). There is a fair argument for the short-term instrumental value of this epistemic practice. An argument against the long-term rationality of using fatalistic arguments to trivialize the attentional import of present setbacks lies in the existence of slow learning rates affecting some instrumental motives and habits of behavior. Non-plastic motives and habits may become maladaptive in changed causal contexts, such as when an organism unlearns its natural agency to avoid aversive stimuli.
As with most issues of epistemic practice, this was put most eloquently by Steven Kaas:
When people say "It is what it is," they're halting their negative affective valuations of the status quo, for lack of a foreseen exit ("I am what I am," and "Boys will be boys (regardless of your interventions)," have much the same character). There is a fair argument for the short-term instrumental value of this epistemic practice. An argument against the long-term rationality of using fatalistic arguments to trivialize the attentional import of present setbacks lies in the existence of slow learning rates affecting some instrumental motives and habits of behavior. Non-plastic motives and habits may become maladaptive in changed causal contexts, such as when an organism unlearns its natural agency to avoid aversive stimuli.
As with most issues of epistemic practice, this was put most eloquently by Steven Kaas:
Many acquire the serenity to accept what they cannot change, only to find the "cannot change" is temporary and the serenity is permanent.
— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) October 16, 2010
Similar tautologies have similar fatalistic power to halt trains of thought: "What's done is done," seems to conflate our (usual) (in)ability to change the past with our ability to recognize the causes of a catastrophe and, armed with that understanding, to mitigate the potential re-occurrence of similar harms. "What will be will be," has some of the stopping-power of "It is what it is" to inhibit one's attempts to positively alter undesirable aspects of present courses of affairs, while also trivializing motives to seek information aiding prediction of future states.
There is another class of literal tautologies that people make common use of, exemplified by "Corn is corn." The pragmatic meaning of this utterance is that there is little variation across products-recognized-as-corn with respect to the functions one wishes to make of it, such that one quantity of corn can usually substitute for an equal quantity. Recognizing the fungibility of a good is, among other things, a way to trivialize the consideration one gives to the causal origin of the good (kind of like an assertion of path independence, saying your preferences are indifferent w.r.t. changes in the production of corn). If someone forcefully tells you that a class of things is itself, maybe it becomes prudent to investigate which variation in the attributes or origins of the things they are implicitly claiming you should be indifferent toward.
Here's another set of tautologies I think form a natural category; see if you can identify the commonalities of pragmatic meaning: "It's not over till it's over," "Enough is enough," "I'll see you when I see you."
The literal-but-pragmatically-informative tautologies I most want to talk about, and the ones that motivated this post, are "No means No" and "Yes means Yes", common political slogans of feminism. (It's kind of wondrous to me, from a emotionally-detached primatologist perspective, that humans can effectively rally around slogans that are tautologies.)
"No means No," endorses a social maxim of taking people's statements of preference at face value, or of setting a low bar for judging when demands of omission of performance are reasonable and deserving of compliance in the domain of sexuality, in order to reduce the expected harms of sexual assault from present levels.
"Yes means Yes" has much the same content, but it emphasizes and prescribes adherence to a social maxim of presuming-by-default the non-consent of other people to involvement in sexual acts, absent their verbal utterance to the contrary.
My understanding of the slogan since I first heard it had been roughly that. But it was only today that I read the phrase "presumed non-consent", and was able to articulate its actual pragmatic message. Unfortunately, I read the phrase "presumed non-consent" in a discussion about markets trading in human organs, and not in (direct) connection with feminism. Maybe tautologies aren't the best possible marketing scheme for clear transmission of ideas.
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Edit: ValueOfType on twitter mentions the case of "rules are rules", and attempts to give an explanation.
The first pragmatic interpretation that springs to my mind is this: There is some piece of advice whose value the audience is considering in their present situation. The speaker categorizes the advice as a rule - a category of advice whose central characteristic is that such advice is reliably and generally worth following, even in cases where the actor has salient doubts about the unconditional application of the advice. (Ideally the speaker judges the worth of the advice by a mature, informed extrapolation of the volition of the audience, but more realistically they will judge by their own preference (or by typical human preferences in cases where the speaker knows that their own preferences are non-representative)). The speaker, having made this categorization for themselves, does not consider the particulars of the situation facing the audience (since rules are applied unconditionally), and they pass without comment on the calculation justifying their categorization of the advice as a rule (which may not be persuasive given the salience of the situation facing the audience).
Instead of asserting, "This advice is a central example of a rule, meriting general compliance," they effectively assert, "Rules merit general compliance", and thus assume the categorization (and assume away issues of categorization) as part of the context or background assumptions of the conversation going forward.
(Framing a disagreement in this way, as depending on the audience's failure to consider an issue of common understanding, might make a good entry for an ArgumentTropes wiki, perhaps under the title Friendly Reminder Conceit).
This perspective unifies at least two of the previously analyzed classes of tautologies: "X is X," often means, "It is a firm assumption of mine that the case you are contemplating is a central example of the category X (with respect to my preferences and the uses I have for X), having the static and central characteristics of that category - which categorization does not merit further consideration of present particulars."
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