We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as counterconventionals. Existing semantics for counterconventionals, 459–482 ) and, 1–27 ) allow counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of predicates and relations. We extend these theories to counterlogicals by allowing counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of logical vocabulary. This yields an elegant semantics for counterlogicals that avoids problems with the usual impossible worlds semantics. We conclude by showing how this approach (...) can be extended to counterpossibles more generally. (shrink)

Most discussions frame the Liar Paradox as a formal logical-linguistic puzzle. Attempts to resolve the paradox have focused very little so far on aspects of cognitive psychology and processing, because semantic and cognitive-psychological issues are generally assumed to be disjunct. I provide a motivation and carry out a cognitive-computational treatment of the liar paradox based on a cognitive-computational model of language and conceptual knowledge within the Predictive Processing framework. I suggest that the paradox arises as a failure of synchronization between (...) two ways of generating the liar situation in two different PP sub-models, one corresponding to language processing and the other to the processing of meaning and world-knowledge. In this way, I put forward the claim that the liar sentence is meaningless but has an air of meaningfulness. I address the possible objection that the proposal violates the Principle of Unrestricted Compositionality, which purportedly regulates the conceptual competence of thinkers. (shrink)

Paraconsistent dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true and that the inference rule ex falso quod libet is invalid. A long-standing problem for paraconsistent dialetheism is that it has difficulty making sense of situations where people use locutions like ‘just true’ and ‘just false’. Jc Beall recently advocated a general strategy, which he terms shrieking, for solving this problem and thereby strengthening the case for paraconsistent dialetheism. However, Beall’s strategy fails, and seeing why it fails brings into greater (...) focus just how daunting the just-true problem is for the dialetheist. (shrink)