The Liar
An Essay on Truth and Circularity
Published on 25. June 1987
207 pages
978-0-19-802175-9 (ISBN)
Description
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 propositions: 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.
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06/1987
Oxford University Press Inc
€18.57
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Content
INTRODUCTION: The Liar; Sentences, statements, and Propositions; The universe of hypersets; RUSSELLIAN PROPOSITIONS AND THE LIAR: Modeling Russellian propositions; Truth of Russellian propositions; Consequences of the Russellian account; Sentences and Russellian propositions; AUSTINIAN PROPOSITIONS AND THE LIAR: Modeling Austinian propositions; Austinian propositions and the world; An Austinian semantics; Relating the Russellian and Austinian accounts; Negation and
denial; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.
