The Liar and the Inconsistency of Language
نویسنده
چکیده
A fairly common assumption about the Liar paradox is that it is a formal problem that can be safely delegated to mathematical logicians, and that its proper resolution can be trusted not to disrupt anyone else’s philosophical theories and projects. Serious students of the Liar know better. While purely formal approaches to the Liar abound, it is not a purely formal problem. Philosophical interpretations of these formal approaches nearly always have non-trivial philosophical consequences. And one of the most striking of these interpretations is Tarski’s1 assertion that natural languages are inconsistent. In this paper, I want to explore the idea that Tarski was right. The term ‘Liar paradox’ is the name traditionally given to the fact that the following schema, while very appealing, is logically inconsistent:
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