Truth, Meaning, and Yablo’s Paradox – A Moderate Anti-Realist Approach

Yablo’s Paradox, an infinite-sentence version of the Liar Paradox, aims to show that semantic paradox can emerge even without circularity. I will argue that the lack of meaning/content of the sentences involved is the source of the paradoxical outcome.I will introduce and argue for a Moderate Antirealist (MAR) approach to truth and meaning, built around the twin principles that neither truth nor meaning can outstrip knowability. Accordingly, I will introduce a MAR truth operator that both forges an explicit connection between truth and knowability and distinguishes between truth and factuality. I will also argue that the meaning/content of propositions should be identified not with the set of possible worlds in which the propositions are true/factual, but rather in which they are known.I will show that our MAR framework dissolves Yablo’s Paradox and also confirms our intuition that these sentences are all devoid of content/meaning.

Contemporary International/World Novels’ Transmissibility from Partial Connections to Hermeneutics of Situation (With References to Glissant, Volpi, Murakami, and Rushdie)

Due to its formal and semantic flexibility, the novel is often viewed as exemplarily associated with globalization. Most interpretations of this view lead to a paradox – presentations that the genre of the novel offers can be specific, and yet, widely circulated – and refer it to transnationalism, to the worlding of many cultural identities, or to some kind of literary space. These interpretations leave open the questioning of the cultural denotations or literary features that empower novels to be widely circulated and universalized. This article identifies and analyzes this explicit questioning in Glissant’s Tout-monde, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Volpi’s In Search of Klingsor, and suggests a quadruple answer. 1. Contemporary novels, that are read as world novels, reflect the paradox that qualifies their world circulation: they designate and deconstruct the signs of the universal by offering totalizing and detotalizing perspective and by questioning their universalization potential. 2. This formal and semantic paradox is presented by means of “partial connec tions”, i.e. objective or imagined references to distant or non-identical cultural references that can be viewed as partially overlapping. Partial connections impose a metonymic view of all chains of cultural mentions, and, between the latter, delineate special kinds of union – differences coexist and unite, and their discontinuities invite to view them as equally real. Partial connections found world novels’ rhetoric and transmissibility. 3. Due to these partial connections, some kind of specific herme neutics is developed or implied – hermeneutics of situation. No overall inter pretation of their own universalizability is offered by world novels – they generate symptomatic readings. 4. Remarkably, these literary and cultural montages apply to canonical kinds of novel – investigation novel (In Search of Klingsor), historical novel (The Moor’s Last Sigh), Bildungsroman (Tout-monde, Kafka on the Shore), that are most often recognized as universal because of their canonicity and the readability they show. On the one hand, these montages alter the canonicity and readability of these kinds of novels, on the other, they trigger their wide circulation because they negate any rule of reading and any overall interpretation, and however suggest some kind of universal hermeneutics – the use of partial connections is of utmost importance.

A UNIFIED THEORY OF TRUTH AND PARADOX

The sentences employed in semantic paradoxes display a wide range of semantic behaviours. However, the main theories of truth currently available either fail to provide a theory of paradox altogether, or can only account for some paradoxical phenomena by resorting to multiple interpretations of the language, as in (Kripke, 1975). In this article, I explore the wide range of semantic behaviours displayed by paradoxical sentences, and I develop a unified theory oftruth and paradox, that is a theory of truth that also provides a unified account of paradoxical sentences. The theory I propose here yields a threefold classification of paradoxical sentences—liar-like sentences, truth-teller–like sentences, and revenge sentences. Unlike existing treatments of semantic paradox, the theory put forward in this article yields a way of interpreting all three kinds of paradoxical sentences, as well as unparadoxical sentences, within a single model.

Is the Liar Paradox a semantic paradox?

The Liar Paradox has been widely discussed from the ancient times and preserved its importance in contemporary philosophy of logic and mathematics. At the beginning of the 20th century, F.P. Ramsey asserted that the Liar Paradox is different from pure logical paradoxes such as Russell’s paradox. The Liar Paradox is connected with language and can be considered a semantic paradox. Ramsey's point of view has become widespread in the logic of the 20th century. The author of the article questions this view. It is argued that the Liar Paradox cannot be unequivocally attributed to the semantic paradoxes and therefore Ramsey's point of view should be revised.

Embracing intensionality: Paradoxicality and semi-truth operators in fixed point models

The Embracing Revenge account of semantic paradox avoids the expressive limitations of previous approaches based on the Kripkean fixed point construction by replacing a single language with an indefinitely extensible sequence of languages, each of which contains the resources to fully characterize the semantics of the previous languages. In this paper we extend the account developed in Cook (2008), Cook (2009), Schlenker (2010), and Tourville and Cook (2016) via the addition of intensional operators such as ``is paradoxical''. In this extended framework we are able to characterize the difference between sentences, such as the Liar and the Truth-teller, that receive the same semantic value in minimal fixed points yet seem to involve distinct semantic phenomena.

Montague, Richard Merett (1930–71)

Richard Montague was a logician, philosopher and mathematician. His mathematical contributions include work in Boolean algebra, model theory, proof theory, recursion theory, axiomatic set theory and higher-order logic. He developed a modal logic in which necessity appears as a predicate of sentences, showing how analogues of the semantic paradoxes relate to this notion. Analogously, he (with David Kaplan) argued that a special case of the surprise examination paradox can also be seen as an epistemic version of semantic paradox. He made important contributions to the problem of formulating the notion of a ‘deterministic’ theory in science.

The Oxford Handbook of Truth

This Handbook contains twenty-nine entries, covering a wide range of topics related to the theory of truth, and its applications in philosophy. It surveys how the concept of truth was understood in ancient and modern philosophy and major debates about truth during the emergence of analytic philosophy. It describes the received standard theories of truth in the current literature, including the coherence, correspondence, identity, and pragmatist theories. It examines the place of truth in metaphysics, focusing on truth-makers, propositions, determinacy, objectivity, deflationism, fictionalism, relativism, and pluralism. It explores broader applications of truth in philosophy, including ethics, science, and mathematics. Finally, it reviews formal work on truth and its application to semantic paradox.