The Pathological Liar: An Exclusionary Approach to Self- Referential Contradictions in Natural Language
نویسنده
چکیده
The liar’s paradox is a simple yet harrowing problem that has plagued logicians and philosophers who study natural language. It is an uncommon sentence, and perhaps a largely useless one outside of artificially-created circumstances. However, it threatens to undo any naivelyconstructed theory of natural language semantics, if the theory does not take the paradox into account. Indeed, many well-known theories of language semantics have been built specifically to avoid the liar’s paradox or to solve it altogether. For theorists to spend so much effort on a single problem—moreover, a case with virtually no practical use—seems, intuitively, a misdirection of effort. To articulate this, first the structure and significance of the liar’s paradox will be examined, as well as Richard Kirkham’s five criteria for solutions that handle the paradox and preserve the integrity of natural language. Next, the liar’s paradox will be classified as a pathological problem, which will influence the development of a theory of natural language semantics. Then, Kirkham’s five criteria will be reexamined in light of the pathological nature of the liar’s paradox, demonstrating how some of the criteria are unnecessary for its resolution. This will point to conclusions on what a solution to the liar’s paradox can possibly mean, and what forms such a solution might have. The liar’s paradox is a pathological problem, a status that dramatically affects the criteria for any solution.
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