John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.

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. (shrink)

This book is about one of the most baffling of all paradoxes – the famous Liar paradox. Suppose we say: 'We are lying now'. Then if we are lying, we are telling the truth; and if we are telling the truth we are lying. This paradox is more than an intriguing puzzle, since it involves the concept of truth. Thus any coherent theory of truth must deal with the Liar. Keith Simmons discusses the solutions proposed by medieval philosophers and offers (...) his own solutions and in the process assesses other attempts to solve the paradox. Unlike such attempts, Simmons' 'singularity' solution does not abandon classical semantics and does not appeal to the kind of hierarchical view found in Barwise's and Etchemendy's The Liar. Moreover, Simmons' solution resolves the vexing problem of semantic universality – the problem of whether there are semantic concepts beyond the expressive reach of a natural language such as English. (shrink)

Jean Buridan has offered a solution to the Liar Paradox, i.e. to the problem of assigning a truth-value to the sentence ‘What I am saying is false’. It has been argued that either this solution is ad hoc since it would only apply to self-referencing sentences [Read, S. 2002. ‘The Liar Paradox from John Buridan back to Thomas Bradwardine’, Vivarium, 40 , 189–218] or else it weakens his theory of truth, making his ‘a logic without truth’ [Klima, G. 2008. ‘Logic (...) without truth: Buridan on the Liar’, in S. Rahman, T. Tulenheimo and E. Genot, Unity, Truth and the Liar: The Modern Relevance of Medieval Solutions to the Liar Paradox, Berlin: Springer, 87–112 ; Dutilh Novaes, C. 2011. ‘Lessons on truth from mediaeval solutions to the Liar Paradox’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 61 , 58–78]. Against , I will argue that Buridan's solution by means of truth by supposition does not involve new principles. Self-referential sentences force us to handle supposition more carefully, which does not warrant the accusation of adhoccery. I will also argue, against (2), that it is exaggerated to assert that this solution leads to a ‘weakened’ theory of truth, since it is consistent with other passages of the Sophismata, which only gives necessary conditions for the truth of affirmative propositions, but sufficient conditions for falsity. (shrink)

This paper presents an approach to truth and the Liar paradox which combines elements of context dependence and hierarchy. This approach is developed formally, using the techniques of model theory in admissible sets. Special attention is paid to showing how starting with some ideas about context drawn from linguistics and philosophy of language, we can see the Liar sentence to be context dependent. Once this context dependence is properly understood, it is argued, a hierarchical structure emerges which is neither ad (...) hoc nor unnatural. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated (...) interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here. (shrink)

I argue for an account of semantic paradox that requires minimal logical revision. I first consider a phenomenon that is common to the paradoxes of definability, Russell’s paradox and the Liar. The phenomenon—which I call Repetition—is this: given a paradoxical expression, we can go on to produce a semantically unproblematic expression composed of the very same words. I argue that Kripke’s and Field’s theories of truth make heavy weather of Repetition, and suggest a simpler contextual account. I go on to (...) outline a ‘singularity’ theory of semantical predicates in the spirit of remarks of Gödel. According to this theory, ‘denotes’, ‘extension’ and ‘true’ are context-sensitive expression that apply almost everywhere on a given occasion of use, except for certain singular points. I then turn to revenge paradoxes, and argue that even the dialetheist is subject to revenge. I then examine how the singularity theory responds to revenge. (shrink)

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 ...

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation. This volume brings together experts from semantics and pragmatics to bring forward the study of interconnections between these three mechanisms. The contributions develop new insights into important empirical phenomena; for example, approximation, free choice, accommodation, and exhaustivity effects.

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on (...) from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

About twenty-five years ago, Charles Parsons published a paper that began by asking why we still discuss the Liar Paradox. Today, the question seems all the more apt. In the ensuing years we have seen not only Parsons’ work (1974), but seminal work of Saul Kripke (1975), and a huge number of other important papers. Too many to list. Surely, one of them must have solved it! In a way, most of them have. Most papers on the Liar Paradox offer (...) some explanation of the behavior of paradoxical sentences, and most also offer some extension for the predicate ‘true’ that they think is adequate, at least in some restricted setting. But if this is a solution, then the problem we face is far from a lack of solutions; rather, we have an overabundance of conflicting ones. Kripke’s work alone provides us with uncountably many different extensions for the truth predicate. Even if it so happens that one of these is a conclusive solution, we do not seem to know which one, or why. We should also ask, given that we are faced with many technically elegant but contradictory views, if they are really all addressing the same problem. What we lack is not solutions, but a way to compare and evaluate the many ones we have. (shrink)

The ?no???no? paradox (so-called by Sorensen) consists of a pair of propositions each of which says of the other that it is false. It is not immediately paradoxical, since it has a solution in which one proposition is true, the other false. However, that is itself paradoxical, since there is no clear ground for determining which is which. The two propositions should have the same truth-value. The paper shows how a proposal by the medieval thinker Thomas Bradwardine solves not only (...) the Liar paradox, but also symmetric paradoxes like the ?no???no?, the descending ?no???no?, and the Truth-teller paradoxes. (shrink)

Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important rôle played by Prior's research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should be (...) familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior's work in ancient and medieval logic. (shrink)

The paper consists of two parts. The first contains the paradox of Truth-teller, i.e. a sentence which asserts own truth. The paradox appears when we apply logic of rejection to the Truth-teller sentence. The Truth-teller paradox is symmetric with respect to the Liar paradox. The second part considers a sentence which asserts own provability. This sentence is unprovable on the base of rejection logic. This leads to counterparts of the Gödel incompleteness theorems and other metamathematical results.