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Abstract

Consideration of a paradox originally discovered by John Buridan provides a springboard for a general solution to paradoxes within the Liar family. The solution rests on a philosophical defence of truth-value-gaps and is consistent (non-dialetheist), avoids ‘revenge’ problems, imports no ad hoc assumptions, is not applicable to only a proper subset of the semantic paradoxes and implies no restriction of the expressive capacities of language.

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Notes

  1. It also goes under the name ‘The no−no paradox’ (Sorensen 2001: 166).

  2. I have adapted, not adopted López de Sa and Zardini’s original example because, instead of ‘believable/unbelievable’, they use ‘short/long’. As will become clear later, we wish to insist that, while sentences may be long or short, it is statements that are true or false, so ‘X is true and long’ is ill-formed by our lights. If, by your lights, it is not, then return to the original López de Sa/Zardini example because the absurdity they derive is even more striking: that whichever of the pair is true is long, while the other, which is false, is short! Manifestly the two sentences are equal in length.

  3. For comparisons of this sort, see Goldstein (2006b).

  4. An anonymous referee points out that abandoning bivalence might be held to be an ineffective remedy even for the Simple Liar (L). For, if, in line with that strategy, we maintain that (L) is neither true nor false, then, in saying of itself that it is false, (L) ‘speaks’ falsely, i.e. it is false after all.

  5. As Nicholas Rescher notes (2001: 165), the ancients were alert to this type of failure to identify. Suppose that the response to the request ‘Identify for me the place where Theon lives’ were ‘He lives where Dion lives’. ‘And where does Dion live?’; ‘He lives where Theon lives’. The difference between this example and the problem of identifying what statement, if any, the Liar sentence makes is that there are alternative ways of locating where Theon lives but there seems to be no alternative to examining truth conditions when it comes to identifying what statement, if any, the Liar sentence yields. See also Rescher (2001: 198–199) on Paul of Venice, who takes the same view as the one defended here, that no statements are delivered by sentences in the Liar family.

  6. Skyrms (1984: 119–120) makes the point more dramatically, with an example deriving from Buridan’s Ninth Sophism: Socrates utters the words ‘The next utterance of Plato will not be true’ and that utterance of Plato’s is ‘Socrates speaks truly’. At that point, Chryssipus intrudes, saying ‘Neither of the foregoing utterances is true or false. They are more like the cries of animals’. The Chryssipian intuition, says Skyrms, is that the utterances of both Socrates and Plato lack truth value, whereas Chryssipus’ own utterance ‘stands above the fray, and thus can comment truly on it’.

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Correspondence to Laurence Goldstein.

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Goldstein, L. A consistent way with paradox. Philos Stud 144, 377–389 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9215-3

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