The material in this note was developed for a first course in logie to illustrate a standard use of logie in analysis. The object was to present a not entirely trivial or artificial confusion that was amenable to resolution using only the tools of quite elementary logic-no modalities, no restrietions to extensional contexts. Copies o f The Problem were distributed. Then, on another day, A Solution.

Quine's areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.

A paradox can be defined as an unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises. Many paradoxes raise serious philosophical problems, and they are associated with crises of thought and revolutionary advances. The expanded and revised third edition of this intriguing book considers a range of knotty paradoxes including Zeno's paradoxical claim that the runner can never overtake the tortoise, a new chapter on paradoxes about morals, paradoxes about belief, and hardest of all, paradoxes about truth. The (...) discussion uses a minimum of technicality but also grapples with complicated and difficult considerations, and is accompanied by helpful questions designed to engage the reader with the arguments. The result is not only an explanation of paradoxes but also an excellent introduction to philosophical thinking. (shrink)

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. (shrink)