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A UNIFIED THEORY OF TRUTH AND PARADOX

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2019

LORENZO ROSSI
LORENZO ROSSI*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy (KGW), University of Salzburg
*
*DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY (KGW) UNIVERSITY OF SALZBURG FRANZISKANERGASSE 1 5020 SALZBURG, AUSTRIA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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 of truth 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.

Keywords

03B50semantic paradoxestruth predicatenaïve truthnon-classical logicsrevenge paradoxes
Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 209 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2019 

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