Abstract
Recently, several philosophers have proposed fictionalist accounts of truth-talk, as a means for resolving the semantic pathology that the Liar Paradox appears to present. These alethic fictionalists aim to vindicate truth-talk as a kind of as if discourse, while rejecting that the talk attributes any real property of truth. Liggins (Analysis 74:566–574, 2014) has recently critically assessed one such proposal, Beall’s (The law of non-contradiction: new philosophical essays. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 197–216, 2004) constructive methodological deflationist (henceforth, ‘CMD’), offering objections to Beall’s proposed alethic fictionalism that potentially generalize to other alethic fictionalist accounts. Liggins further argues that CMD supports a classically consistent response to the Liar Paradox—one that can be extracted from CMD, while leaving its putatively problematic fictionalist elements behind in favor of alethic nihilism. In this paper, after establishing that Liggins’s criticisms of CMD are off base, we show that the classical resolution of the Liar Paradox that he proposes is unworkable. Since his resistance to alethic fictionalism turns out to be unmotivated, we conclude that this approach is still worth considering as a framework for a resolution of the Liar Paradox.
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Notes
For a discussion of how this works, see Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015), Chapter 2.
In the account that Walton gives of existence-talk in particular, the redirection away from the surface phenomenology is enhanced by the fact that his analysis involves what he calls “prop-oriented” make-believe, rather than “content-oriented” make-believe (see Walton (1993)). As a result, existence-talk serves, on his view, as an indirect means for talking specifically about the props involved in the pretenses it invokes, rather than about the content of the make-believe at work in instances of existence-talk, including the pretenses displayed in their surface appearances. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing us to elaborate on these points.
Liggins seems not to distinguish “Waltonian” accounts from fictionalist accounts generally, which he (Ibid., pp. 572-573) understands in terms of story-prefixes. But this is to miss important differences between pretense-based fictionalist accounts and story-prefix fictionalist accounts. For more on these differences, see Caddick Bourne (2013) and Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015), Chapter 1.
We should note that another response one might make to this argument is to bite the bullet and acknowledge that, as cognitive agents, we often, or even typically, are wrong about our own mental states. This simply requires rejecting introspective psychology, which is something we explicitly repudiate. (See Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015), Chapter 2.)
Of course, if a speaker were asked whether she believes something she has asserted, she might then reflect on her doxastic state and come to take herself to believe it. But this is not something that she will normally do, in the ordinary course of speaking and believing.
See Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015), Chapters 3 and 5, for an explanation of this.
Of course, if we were to ask speakers whether they believed the truth-ascriptions they assertorically utter, it seems quite likely that they would say that they do believe them, which might make it appear that they take themselves to believe them. But to arrive at the conclusion that they take themselves to believe these truth-ascriptions, we must assume introspective psychology, which, again, is something that we explicitly repudiate. Thus, even if they would claim that they do believe these truth-ascriptions, it does not follow that they do, for they might very well be wrong about what they take themselves to believe. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing us to make this point.
Given the dual nature of affirming and denying, related, as they are, to the expression of the mental attitudes of acceptance and rejection, you should never both affirm and deny what a given sentence token says. (The need for enlisting tokens is to take account of context-sensitive terms. Thus, it might be that we should deny what one occurrence of ‘I am hungry’ says, at one time, and affirm what is said with a different occurrence of that very sentence type at a different time.).
It bears noting that ‘entitled to ϕ’, here and throughout, has the force of ‘it would be acceptable for one to ϕ, though one is not, per se, obligated to ϕ’. In particular, in this sense of ‘entitled’, if you are entitled to ϕ, but you do not, you are not doing something wrong; you are, rather, just not doing something that it would be acceptable for you to do.
This will block the generation of Moorean paradoxes, which is the point of the stronger knowledge component.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for impressing upon us the importance of revising both (A1) and (A2).
A variant of (A2) seems to follow from the considerations behind Liggins’s (Ibid.) claim that we should assert the right-hand side of (5) (or, as we might put it, affirm what the right-hand side of (5) says), given the highly plausible claim that if we should ϕ, then we are entitled to ϕ. The converse clearly does not hold. There are plenty of cases in which we are entitled to do something that we, nevertheless, should not do, all things considered. Why should we assert what the right-hand side of (5) says, according to Liggins? On his view, nothing is true, so what the right-hand side of (5) says is the case, and, moreover, if we assume his account, we can establish that (L) is not true. These seem to provide the considerations in support of asserting what the right-hand side of (5) says, from whence we can get something like (A2).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for a very helpful suggestion about how we might revise our original revenge problem for Liggins.
Of course, if Liggins were to adopt this possible response, he would have to provide reasons for thinking that (λ) does not say anything, to avoid a charge of ad hockery. Although we do not see how Liggins could avoid such a charge, we leave it to him to motivate this possible response, should he choose to adopt it.
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Armour-Garb, B., Woodbridge, J.A. Alethic fictionalism, alethic nihilism, and the Liar Paradox. Philos Stud 174, 3083–3096 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0847-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0847-4