Truth, the Liar, and Relativism

Scharp, Kevin

doi:10.1215/00318108-2087663

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 96 publications

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“…For a recent defense of a relativistic solution to the liar see (Scharp, 2013). 14 Moreover, were one to resist identifying the liar discourse as assessments of the semantic theory, we still remain with a form of relativism: we have an utterance receiving two different truth values on two occasions-it is just that now we cannot point to the context of assessments as the additional parameter by which semantic value can be determined.…”

Section: From Contextualism To Relativismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualism, Relativism and the Liar

Sagi

2016

Erkenn

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Contextualist theories of truth appeal to context to solve the liar paradox: different stages of reasoning occur in different contexts, and so the contradiction is dispelled. The word 'true' is relativized by the contextualists to contexts of use. This paper shows that contextualist approaches to the liar are committed to a form of semantic relativism: that the truth value of some sentences depends on the context of assessment, as well as the context of use. In particular, it is shown how Simmons's and Glanzberg's contextualist approaches entail relativism. In both cases, the liar sentence gets different semantic evaluations as uttered in a fixed context of use but assessed from different contexts. Shift in context of use alone cannot provide the full explanation of the liar. These contextualist approaches, as originally presented, were thus mischaracterised and they should be re-evaluated according to their full implications.

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Section: From Contextualism To Relativismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualism, Relativism and the Liar

Sagi

2016

Erkenn

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“…Insofar 7 If utterances, and not sentences, are truth bearers then the discussion below will have to be modified slightly; I attend to this at the appropriate point. 8 One might have hoped to include inconsistency accounts of the paradoxes in this list (see Chihara (1979), Yablo (1993), Eklund (2002), Azzouni (2007), Patterson (2009), Scharp (2013.) However it is not entirely clear what it means for a sentence to be healthy according to these views.…”

Section: The Impossibility Of a Classical Revenge-free Linguistic Diamentioning

confidence: 99%

Can the Classical Logician Avoid the Revenge Paradoxes?

Bacon

2015

The Philosophical Review

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Most work on the semantic paradoxes within classical logic has centred around what I call 'linguistic' accounts of the paradoxes: they attribute to sentences or utterances of sentences some property that is supposed to explain their paradoxical or non-paradoxical status. 'No proposition' views are paradigm examples of linguistic theories, although practically all accounts of the paradoxes subscribe to some kind of linguistic theory. This paper shows that linguistic accounts of the paradoxes endorsing classical logic are subject to a particularly acute form of the revenge paradox: that there is no exhaustive classification of sentences into 'good' and 'bad' such that the T-schema holds when restricted to the 'good' sentences unless it is also possible to prove some 'bad' sentences. The foundations for an alternative classical non-linguistic approach is outlined which is not subject to the same kinds of problems. Although revenge paradoxes of different strengths can be formulated, they are found to be indeterminate at higher orders and not inconsistent.

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“…The second strategy is to accept an inconsistency theory -roughly along the lines of those presented in, for example, Eklund (2002), Ludwig (2002), Patterson (2009), and Scharp (2013). On this line of thought, semantic competence is underpinned by a mechanism that, roughly speaking, encodes a contradiction.…”

Section: Line Of Response: Deny That Inconsistency Is a Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Borg’s Minimalism and the Problem of Paradox

Pinder

2014

Semantics and Beyond

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According to Emma Borg, minimalism is (roughly) the view that natural language sentences have truth conditions, and that these truth conditions are fully determined by syntactic structure and lexical content. A principal motivation for her brand of minimalism is that it coheres well with the popular view that semantic competence is underpinned by the cognition of a minimal semantic theory. In this paper, I argue that the liar paradox presents a serious problem for this principal motivation. Two lines of response to the problem are discussed, and difficulties facing those responses are raised. I close by issuing a challenge: to construe the principal motivation for Borg's version of minimalism in such a way so as to avoid the problem of paradox.

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Truth, the Liar, and Relativism

Cited by 20 publications

References 96 publications

Contextualism, Relativism and the Liar

Contextualism, Relativism and the Liar

Can the Classical Logician Avoid the Revenge Paradoxes?

Borg’s Minimalism and the Problem of Paradox

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