Paradoxicality in Kripke’s theory of truth

Abstract

A lot has been written on solutions to the semantic paradoxes, but very little on the topic of general theories of paradoxicality. The reason for this, we believe, is that it is not easy to disentangle a solution to the paradoxes from a specific conception of what those paradoxes consist in. This paper goes some way towards remedying this situation. We first address the question of what one should expect from an account of paradoxicality. We then present one conception of paradoxicality that has been offered in the literature: the fixed-point conception.According to this conception, a statement is paradoxical if it cannot obtain a classical truthvalue at any fixed-point model. In order to assess this proposal rigorously we provide a nonmetalinguistic characterization of paradoxicality and we evaluate whether the resulting account satisfies a number of reasonable desiderata.