The Liar: An Essay on Truth and Circularity

by Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy

Bringing together powerful new tools from set theory and the philosophy of language, this book proposes a solution to one of the few unresolved paradoxes from antiquity, the Paradox of the Liar. Treating truth as a property of propositions, not sentences, the authors model two distinct conceptions of one based on the standard notion used by Bertrand Russell, among others, and the other based on J.L. Austin's work on truth. Comparing these two accounts, the authors show that while the Russellian conception of the relation between sentences, propositions, and truth is crucially flawed in limiting cases, the Austinian perspective has fruitful applications to the analysis of semantic paradox. In the course of their study of a language admitting circular reference and containing its own truth predicate, Barwise and Etchemendy also develop a wide range of model-theoretic techniques--based on a new set-theoretic tool, Peter Aczel's theory of hypersets--that open up new
avenues in logical and formal semantics.

Genres: Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[TjeerdFokkens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great essay about the liar paradox. Two solutions are given to the paradox that puzzled people for so many centuries, one based on Russellian and the other on Austinian semantics. This essay is most probably not the final word about the paradox, but it does highlight the sources of the problem very well. The use of Aczel's hypersets is very interesting and was nice to read. Later on the text becomes quite technical, but there is some good philosophical reflection at the end. Very nice.