Tautology (rule of inference)
In propositional logic, tautology is either of two commonly used rules of replacement. The rules are used to eliminate redundancy in disjunctions and conjunctions when they occur in logical proofs. They are:
The principle of idempotency of disjunction:
and the principle of idempotency of conjunction:
Where "" is a metalogical symbol representing "can be replaced in a logical proof with."s are those logical formulas where is the conclusion of a valid proof, while the equivalent semantic consequence indicates a tautology.
The tautology rule may be expressed as a sequent:
and
where is a metalogical symbol meaning that is a syntactic consequence of, in the one case, in the other, in some logical system;
or as a rule of inference:
and
where the rule is that wherever an instance of "" or "" appears on a line of a proof, it can be replaced with "";
or as the statement of a truth-functional tautology or theorem of propositional logic. The principle was stated as a theorem of propositional logic by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica as:
and
where is a proposition expressed in some formal system.
