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The Liar Parody

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Don S. Levi
Don S. Levi
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
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Extract

The Liar Paradox is a philosophical bogyman. It refuses to die, despite everything that philosophers have done to kill it. Sometimes the attacks on it seem little more than expressions of positivist petulance, as when the Liar sentence is said to be nonsense or meaningless. Sometimes the attacks are based on administering to the Liar sentence arbitrary if not unfair tests for admitting of truth or falsity that seem designed expressly to keep it from qualifying. Some philosophers have despaired of ever beating the Liar; so concerned have they been about the threat posed by the Liar that they have introduced legislation to exclude the Liar sentence and anything like it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 63 , Issue 243 , January 1988 , pp. 43 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988

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References

1 Cf. Gupta, Anil, ‘Truth and Paradox’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 11, No. 1 (01 1982), 1–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gupta begins his paper by observing that the Liar raises both a descriptive and a normative problem about the concept of truth. The latter has to do with changes that the paradox forces in the concept of truth and our use of ‘true’. The former also seems to presuppose that the Paradox is unacceptable:

We have no difficulty in using the word ‘true’ in many sentences but we have no systematic understanding of what distinguishes these trouble-free sentences from the troublesome ones, and we have no systematic understanding of what these trouble-free sentences mean (p. 1).

To provide this understanding is the task of the descriptive problem. But Gupta seems to be interested in this problem of distinguishing between the two classes of statements—those that yield strange loops and those that do not—even if the members of the first class were not really troublesome.

2 Moffat, John, The Structure of English (Christchurch: Pegasus, 1969), 100–101.Google Scholar

3 Kripke, Saul, ‘Truth’, Journal of Philosophy 72, No. 19 (6 11 1975), 691–692.Google Scholar

4 White, Theodore, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 327.Google Scholar

5 Higgins, George V., The Friends of Richard Nixon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 210–211.Google Scholar