Articulation and Liars

Super Liars

Kripke's theory of truth offered a trivalent semantics for a language which, like English, contains a truth predicate and means of self-reference; but it did so by severely restricting the expressive power of the logic. In Kripke's analysis, the Liar (e.g. This very sentence is not true) receives the indeterminate truth value, but this fact cannot be expressed in the language; by contrast, it i...

Catching Liars.

While trying to think of an interesting way to introduce this major review of the field of lie detection, I did what lots of people do these days. I typed ‘‘catching liars’’ into the Google search bar and up came 305,000 results in .17 seconds. The first page was ‘‘10 ways to catch a liar’’ from WebMD. The essay featured J.J. Newberry, a trained federal agent purported to be skilled at detectin...

Fears May Be Liars

Liars, Damned Liars, and Zealots: The Effect of Moral Mandates on Transgressive Advocacy Acceptance

This research explored people’s reactions to targets who “went too far” to support noble causes. We hypothesized that observers’ moral mandates would shape their perceptions of others’ advocacy, even when that advocacy was transgressive, that is, when it used norm-violating means (i.e., lying) to achieve a preferred end. Observers were expected to accept others’ advocacy, independent of its cre...

Yablo’s Paradox and Kindred Infinite Liars

This is a defense and extension of Stephen Yablo’s claim that self-reference is completely inessential to the liar paradox. An infinite sequence of sentences of the form “None of these subsequent sentences are true” generates the same instability in assigning truth values. I argue Yablo’s technique of substituting infinity for self-reference applies to all so-called “self-referential” paradoxes...