Paradoxes, particularly Tarski’s liar paradox, represent an ongoing challenge have long attracted special interest. There have been numerous attempts to give either a formal or a more realistic resolution to this area based on natural logical intuition or common sense. The present semantic analysis of the problem components concludes that the traditional language of logic fails to detect Tarski...

'What is a sadist? A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.' When I first heard this joke, I smiled, of course, realizing that the brutality of the sadist is, in fact, kindness to a masochist, which is the source of the comic effect being a(n apparent) contradiction resolved. What I did not realize was that I would have had another reason to smile: the kindness of the sadist tortures th...

The liar paradox is still an open philosophical problem. Most contemporary answers to the target logical principles underlying reasoning from sentence paradoxical conclusion that both true and false. In contrast these answers, Buddhist epistemology offers resources devise a distinctively epistemological approach paradox. this paper, I mobilise argue what epistemologists call contradiction with ...

The ancient sorites paradox is traditionally attributed to Eubulides, a contemporary of Aristotle and a member of the Megarian school, who is also credited with inventing the liar paradox. The sorites paradox figures centrally in most discussions of vagueness in philosophy and in logic. In my view, it has profound implications for metaphysics and semantics, as well as for logic. In this paper I...

In this paper I discuss a paradox, due to David Kaplan, that in his view threatens the use of possible worlds semantics as a model-theoretic framework for intensional logic.1 Kaplan’s paradox starts out from an intuitively reasonable principle that I refer to as the Principle of Plenitude. From this principle he derives a contradiction in what he calls Naive Possible World Theory. Kaplan’s meta...

About twenty-five years ago, Charles Parsons published a paper that began by asking why we still discuss the Liar Paradox. Today, the question seems all the more apt. In the ensuing years we have seen not only Parsons’ work (1974), but seminal work of Saul Kripke (1975), and a huge number of other important papers. Too many to list. Surely, one of them must have solved it! In a way, most of the...

A common objection to hierarchical approaches to truth is that they fragment the concept of truth. This paper defends hierarchical approaches in general against the objection of fragmentation. It argues that the fragmentation required is familiar and unproblematic, via a comparison with mathematical proof. Furthermore, it offers an explanation of the source and nature of the fragmentation of tr...

The sceptic about the external world presents us with a paradox: an apparently acceptable argument for an apparently unacceptable conclusion—that we do not know anything about the external world. Some paradoxes, for instance the liar and the sorites, are very hard. The defense of a purported solution to either of these two inevitably deploys the latest in high-tech philosophical weaponry. On th...