The Liar Paradox

The Liar Paradox challenges logicians’ and semanticists’ theories of truth and meaning. Modern accounts of paradoxes in formal semantics offer solutions through the hierarchy of object language and metalanguage. Yet this solution to the Liar presupposes that sentences have unique meaning. This assumption is non-controversial in formal languages, but an account of how “hidden meaning” is made explicit is necessary to any complete analysis of natural language. Since the Liar Paradox presents itself as a sentence uniting contradictory meanings, appreciating how they can be united in a single sentence may provide new insights into this and other paradoxes.

The Liar Paradox challenges logicians’ and semanticists’ theories of truth and meaning. Modern accounts of paradoxes in formal semantics offer solutions through the hierarchy of object language and metalanguage. Yet this solution to the Liar presupposes that sentences have unique meaning. This assumption is non-controversial in formal languages, but an account of how “hidden meaning” is made explicit is necessary to any complete analysis of natural language. Since the Liar Paradox presents itself as a sentence uniting contradictory meanings, appreciating how they can be united in a single sentence may provide new insights into this and other paradoxes.

Paradox Lost covers ten of philosophy’s most fascinating paradoxes, in which seemingly compelling reasoning leads to absurd conclusions. The following paradoxes are included:

Paradox Lost covers ten of philosophy’s most fascinating paradoxes, in which seemingly compelling reasoning leads to absurd conclusions. The following paradoxes are included: