Abstract
Possibly, the simplest formulations of the Liar Paradox are (1) and (2),
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Notes
- 1.
We call “grounded” a truth ascription if there is a felicitous speech act in which a content is produced and to which the ascription attributes a truth value. “If some of these sentences themselves involve the notion of truth, their truth value in turn must be ascertained by looking at other sentences, and so on. If ultimately this process terminates in sentences not mentioning the concept of truth, so that the truth value of the original statement can be ascertained, we call the original sentence grounded; otherwise, ungrounded” (Kripke 1975, p. 693–4).
- 2.
See (Kirkham 1995: 28fff) for a development of the revisionary view that rejects truth as a predicate. As should be clear already, ours is a proposal that fits what Kirkham calls the “deep-structure project”.
- 3.
Nevertheless, the prosententialist analysis given in this book adds to the contextualist solution that stresses the importance of context the thesis that truth and falsity adscriptions are context-dependent expressions de jure. They, as any utterance, are affected by contextual factors, but in a more dramatic way, for pro-forms are variables.
- 4.
Sperber and Wilson, by acknowledging a grain of truth in the coding-decoding mode of communication, make room for the relevance of context-independent conventional meanings. Recanati’s position is very different In (2004) he defends Meaning Eliminativism, a position that does not leave any aspect of meaning unaffected by contextual factors. He says: “Meaning Eliminativism […] denies that words (qua linguistic types) have ‘meanings’ in anything like the traditional sense—not even an abstract or knowledge-rich meanings, as in Wrong Format. Meanings for types undergo wholesale elimination, in favour of the senses contextually expressed by particular tokens” (Recanati 2004: 141).
- 5.
Frege adapts his Principle of Context to the case of numerical expressions as follows: “How, then, are numbers to be given to us, if we cannot have any ideas or intuitions of them? Since it is only in the context of a proposition that words have any meaning, our problem become this: To define the sense of a proposition in which a number word occurs.” Frege 1884, § 62 (p. 73). In this text, “proposition” should be understood as “sentence”.
- 6.
In representational semantics, valid inferences preserve truth. In inferential semantics, truth is defined as what transmitted in a good inference. A true proposition is one ready to be used as a premise in an inferential act. In both cases, truth is involved in the definition of validity.
- 7.
It is appropriate if “truth” is interpreted as a formal relation. Truth applied to formal languages is a formal correlate of truth in natural languages, as happens with the rest of logical and semantic notions.
- 8.
The Linguistic Direction Principle is stated by Recanati as follows: “A pragmatically determined aspect of meaning is part of what is said if and only if its contextual determination is triggered by the grammar, that is, if the sentence itself sets up a slot to be contextually filed.” (Recanati 1993: 255). Years later, Recanati summarizes the Grammatical Constraint as follows: “We are always supposed to try to eliminate discrepancies between syntactic and semantic structure” (Recanati 2010a: 28).
- 9.
For an informed discussion of the reasons and consequences of (T-in) and (T-out) see, for instance, Field (2008), Part II, especially chapters 6, 7 and 8.
- 10.
Thus, we completely agree with Kripke when he draws “[t]he moral: an adequate theory must allow our statements involving the notion of truth to be risky: they risk being paradoxical if the empirical facts are extremely (and unexpectedly) unfavorable. There can be no syntactic or semantic “sieve” that will winnow out the “bad” cases while preserving the “good” ones (Kripke, 1975, p. 682). We consider nevertheless that paradoxical, infelicitous, vacuous and, in general, faulty speech acts can be produced related to any notion, not just the notion of truth, in extremely adverse situations. There is nothing special with the notion of truth in this respect. Austin’s Williams James Lectures of 1955 (Austin 1962) are devoted to the analysis of some of the constraints that a felicitous speech act has to obey and the different kinds of infelicities produced when they are infringed.
- 11.
Kaplan saw this already and in his “Demonstratives” (Kaplan 1977).
- 12.
On the second page of this paper, Tarski says: “A thorough analysis of the meaning current in everyday life of the term ‘true’ is not intended here” (1933/1983: 153).
- 13.
“The desired definition does not aim to specify the meaning of a familiar word used to denote a novel notion; on the contrary, it aims to catch hold of the actual meaning of an old notion. We must then characterize this notion precisely enough to enable anyone to determine whether the definition actually fulfils its task” (1944:§ 1).
- 14.
In “Pragmatics and the logical form”, Recanati gives credit to Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990) for the distinction.
- 15.
Tarski in § 2 of his (1944), and Ramsey in (1927b). It is not uncommon to defend that Tarski developed and made Ramsey’s ideas more precise; Davidson (2005a), p. 11 is an example. We reject this interpretation of Ramsey’s work. The presuppositions of Ramsey’s philosophy are very distant from the presuppositions that support Tarski’s analysis of truth.
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Frápolli, M.J. (2013). The Liar Paradox (And Other Logico-Semantic Issues). In: The Nature of Truth. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4464-6_5
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