Unity, Truth and the Liar: The Modern Relevance of Medieval Solutions to the Liar Paradox

Description

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. This volume includes a target paper, taking up the challenge to revive, within a modern (formal) framework, a medieval solution to the Liar Paradox which did not assume Uniqueness of Meaning. Stephen Read, author of the target paper, attempts to formally state a theory of truth that dates back to the 14th century logician Thomas Bradwardine; the theory offers a solution to the Liar Paradox in which the Liar sentence turns out to be false. The rest of the volume consists of papers discussing and/or challenging Read’s – and Bradwardine’s -- views one the one hand, and papers addressing the doctrinal and historical background of medieval theories of truth on the other hand. It also includes a critical edition of Heytesbury’s treatise on insolubles, closely related to Bradwardine’s view. Including formal, philosophical and historical discussions, this volume intends to renew the debate about paradoxes and theory of truth, and to show that the interest of earlier medieval work is not merely historical but, on the contrary, still relevant for modern, formal semantic theory. It is of interest for both professional philosophers and advanced students of philosophy. Front Matter....Pages i-xxiv The Truth Schema and the Liar....Pages 3-17 Read and Indirect Revenge....Pages 19-40 Tarski's Hidden Theory of Meaning: Sentences Say Exactly One Thing....Pages 41-63 Doubting Thomas: From Bradwardine Back to Anon....Pages 65-85 Logic Without Truth....Pages 87-112 Scheming and Lying....Pages 113-128 Comments on Stephen Read's “The Truth-Schema and the Liar”....Pages 129-134 Models for Liars in Bradwardine's Theory of Truth....Pages 135-147 On a New Account of the Liar....Pages 149-157 The Liar Cannot Be Solved....Pages 159-186 Out of the Liar Tangle....Pages 187-197 Read about T-Scheme....Pages 199-203 Further Thoughts on Tarski's T-scheme and the Liar....Pages 205-225 Restrictionism: A Medieval Approach Revisited....Pages 229-253 William Heytesbury and the Treatment of Insolubilia in Fourteenth-Century England Followed by a Critical Edition of Three Anonymous Treatises De Insolubilibus Inspired by Heytesbury....Pages 255-333 Back Matter....Pages 335-338