In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

This paper develops the idea that valid arguments are equivalent to true conditionals by combining Kripke’s theory of truth with the evidential account of conditionals offered by Crupi and Iacona. As will be shown, in a first-order language that contains a naïve truth predicate and a suitable conditional, one can define a validity predicate in accordance with the thesis that the inference from a conjunction of premises to a conclusion is valid when the corresponding conditional is true. The validity predicate (...) so defined significantly increases our expressive resources and provides a coherent formal treatment of paradoxical arguments. (shrink)

The paper offers a critical examination of a prominent, “quasi-deflationist” argument advanced in the contemporary debate on the semantic paradoxes against non-naive and non-transparent theories of truth. The argument claims that truth unrestrictedly fulfils certain expressive functions, and that its so doing requires the unrestricted validity of naivety and transparency principles. The paper criticises the quasi-deflationist argument by considering some kinds of cases in which transparency and naivety arguably fail. In some such cases truth still fulfils the relevant expressive functions (...) without being transparent or naive; in some other such cases, truth does not fulfil the relevant expressive functions and other conceptual resources must be called upon. Thus, in different ways, all such cases belie the quasi-deflationist argument’s insistence that naivety and transparency should be unrestrictedly valid for truth unrestrictedly to fulfil the relevant expressive functions. There might however be other reasons for solving the semantic paradoxes by revising classical logic, and the paper in effect closes by offering versions of the liar paradox that rely on compelling but opacity-friendly truth-theoretic principles. (shrink)

The naive theory of vagueness holds that the vagueness of an expression consists in its failure to draw a sharp boundary between positive and negative cases. The naive theory is contrasted with the nowadays dominant approach to vagueness, holding that the vagueness of an expression consists in its presenting borderline cases of application. The two approaches are briefly compared in their respective explanations of a paramount phenomenon of vagueness: our ignorance of any sharp boundary between positive and negative cases. These (...) explanations clearly do not provide any ground for choosing the dominant approach against the naive theory. The decisive advantage of the former over the latter is rather supposed to consist in its immunity to any form of sorites paradox. But another paramount phenomenon of vagueness is higher-order vagueness: the expressions introduced in order to express in the object language the vagueness of the object language are themselves vague. Two highly plausible claims about higher-order vagueness are articulated and defended: the existence of “definitely ω ” positive and negative cases and the “radical” character of higher-order vagueness itself. Using very weak logical principles concerning vague expressions and the ‘definitely’-operator, it is then shown that, in the presence of higher-order vagueness as just described, the dominant approach is subject to higher-order sorites paradoxes analogous to the original ones besetting the naive theory, and therefore that, against the communis opinio, it does not fare substantially better with respect to immunity to any form of sorites paradox. (shrink)

We consider notions of truth and logical validity defined in various recent constructions of Hartry Field. We try to explicate his notion of determinate truth by clarifying the path-dependent hierarchies of his determinateness operator.

In Kripke’s classic paper on truth it is argued that by adding a new semantic category different from truth and falsity it is possible to have a language with its own truth predicate. A substantial problem with this approach is that it lacks the expressive resources to characterize those sentences which fall under the new category. The main goal of this paper is to offer a refinement of Kripke’s approach in which this difficulty does not arise. We tackle this characterization (...) problem by letting certain sentences belong to more than one semantic category. We also consider the prospect of generalizing this framework to deal with languages containing vague predicates. (shrink)

There is a standard objection against purported explanations of how a language L can express the notion of being a true sentence of L. According to this objection, such explanations avoid one paradox (the Liar) only to succumb to another of the same kind. Even if L can contain its own truth predicate, we can identify another notion it cannot express, on pain of contradiction via Liar-like reasoning. This paper seeks to undermine such ‘revenge’ by arguing that it presupposes a (...) dubious assumption about the linguistic expression of concepts. Successful revenge would require that there be a notion other than truth that plays the same role with respect to concept-expression that truth is naturally thought to play before we are confronted with the Liar paradox. (shrink)

Although there has been a recent swell of interest in theories of truth that attempt solutions to the liar paradox and the other paradoxes affecting our concept of truth, many of these theories have been criticized for generating new paradoxes, called revenge paradoxes. The criticism is that the theories of truth in question are inadequate because they only work for languages lacking in the resources to generate revenge paradoxes. Theorists facing these objections offer a range of replies, and the matter (...) seems now to be at a standoff. I aim, first, to bolster the revenge objections by considering a relation, internalizability, between languages and theories of truth. A theory of truth is internalizable for a language iff there is an extension of that language in which the theory is expressible and for which the theory provides an accurate and complete assignment of semantic values. There are good reasons to think that acceptable theories of truth are internalizable for any language. With this internalizability requirement in hand, I argue that properly formulated revenge objections are decisive and that the replies to them are inadequate. Second, I show that the internalizability requirement can be met by a certain theory of truth. The central claim of this theory is that truth is an inconsistent concept and should be replaced with a pair of consistent concepts that can then be used to provide a semantics for our truth predicates. This theory is compatible with classical logic, does not give rise to revenge paradoxes of any kind, and satisfies the internalizability requirement. (shrink)

One of the main logical functions of the truth predicate is to enable us to express so-called ‘infinite conjunctions’. Several authors claim that the truth predicate can serve this function only if it is fully disquotational, which leads to triviality in classical logic. As a consequence, many have concluded that classical logic should be rejected. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we consider two accounts available in the literature of what it means to express infinite conjunctions with a (...) truth predicate and argue that they fail to support the necessity of transparency for that purpose. Second, we show that, with the aid of some regimentation, many expressive functions of the truth predicate can actually be performed using truth principles that are consistent in classical logic. Finally, we suggest a reconceptualisation of deflationism, according to which the principles that govern the use of the truth predicate in natural language are largely irrelevant for the question of what formal theory of truth we should adopt. Many philosophers think that the paradoxes pose a special problem for deflationists; we will argue, on the contrary, that deflationists are in a much better position to deal with the paradoxes than their opponents. (shrink)

In recent work Philip Welch has proven the existence of ‘ineffable liars’ for Hartry Field’s theory of truth. These are offered as liar-like sentences that escape classification in Field’s transfinite hierarchy of determinateness operators. In this article I present a slightly more general characterization of the ineffability phenomenon, and discuss its philosophical significance. I show the ineffable sentences to be less ‘liar-like’ than they appear in Welch’s presentation. I also point to some open technical problems whose resolution would greatly clarify (...) the philosophical issues raised by the ineffability phenomenon. (shrink)

Revenge arguments purport to show that any proposed solution to the semantic paradoxes generates new paradoxes that prove that solution to be inadequate. In this paper, I focus on revenge arguments that employ the model-theoretic semantics of a target theory and I argue, contra the current revenge-theoretic wisdom, that they can constitute genuine expressive limitations. I consider the anti-revenge strategy elaborated by Field and argue that it does not offer a way out of the revenge problem. More generally, I argue (...) that the difference between ‘standard’ and ‘revenge’ paradoxes is ill-conceived and should be abandoned. This will contribute to show that the theories that provide a uniform account of truth and other semantic notions are the ones best equipped to avoid the paradoxes altogether—‘standard’ and ‘revenge’ alike. (shrink)

Kripke’s theory of truth, 690–716; 1975) has been very successful but shows well-known expressive difficulties; recently, Field has proposed to overcome them by adding a new conditional connective to it. In Field’s theories, desirable conditional and truth-theoretic principles are validated that Kripke’s theory does not yield. Some authors, however, are dissatisfied with certain aspects of Field’s theories, in particular the high complexity. I analyze Field’s models and pin down some reasons for discontent with them, focusing on the meaning of the (...) new conditional and on the status of the principles so successfully recovered. Subsequently, I develop a semantics that improves on Kripke’s theory following Field’s program of adding a conditional to it, using some inductive constructions that include Kripke’s one and feature a strong evaluation for conditionals. The new theory overcomes several problems of Kripke’s one and, although weaker than Field’s proposals, it avoids the difficulties that affect them; at the same time, the new theory turns out to be quite simple. Moreover, the new construction can be used to model various conceptions of what a conditional connective is, in ways that are precluded to both Kripke’s and Field’s theories. (shrink)

Tarski's Undefinability of Truth Theorem comes in two versions: that no consistent theory which interprets Robinson's Arithmetic (Q) can prove all instances of the T-Scheme and hence define truth; and that no such theory, if sound, can even express truth. In this note, I prove corresponding limitative results for validity. While Peano Arithmetic already has the resources to define a predicate expressing logical validity, as Jeff Ketland has recently pointed out (2012, Validity as a primitive. Analysis 72: 421-30), no theory (...) which interprets Q closed under the standard structural rules can define nor express validity, on pain of triviality. The results put pressure on the widespread view that there is an asymmetry between truth and validity, viz. that while the former cannot be defined within the language, the latter can. I argue that Vann McGee's and Hartry Field's arguments for the asymmetry view are problematic. (shrink)

Beall and Murzi :143–165, 2013) introduce an object-linguistic predicate for naïve validity, governed by intuitive principles that are inconsistent with the classical structural rules. As a consequence, they suggest that revisionary approaches to semantic paradox must be substructural. In response to Beall and Murzi, Field :1–19, 2017) has argued that naïve validity principles do not admit of a coherent reading and that, for this reason, a non-classical solution to the semantic paradoxes need not be substructural. The aim of this paper (...) is to respond to Field’s objections and to point to a coherent notion of validity which underwrites a coherent reading of Beall and Murzi’s principles: grounded validity. The notion, first introduced by Nicolai and Rossi, is a generalisation of Kripke’s notion of grounded truth, and yields an irreflexive logic. While we do not advocate the adoption of a substructural logic, we take the notion of naïve validity to be a legitimate semantic notion that points to genuine expressive limitations of fully structural revisionary approaches. (shrink)

It is often argued that fully structural theories of truth and related notions are incapable of expressing a nonstratified notion of defectiveness. We argue that recently much-discussed non-contractive theories suffer from the same expressive limitation, provided they identify the defective sentences with the sentences that yield triviality if they are assumed to satisfy structural contraction.

Since Saul Kripke’s influential work in the 1970s, the revisionary approach to semantic paradox—the idea that semantic paradoxes must be solved by weakening classical logic—has been increasingly popular. In this paper, we present a new revenge argument to the effect that the main revisionary approaches breed new paradoxes that they are unable to block.

This paper presents a range of new triviality proofs pertaining to naïve truth theory formulated in paraconsistent relevant logics. It is shown that excluded middle together with various permutation principles such as A → (B → C)⊩B → (A → C) trivialize naïve truth theory. The paper also provides some new triviality proofs which utilize the axioms ((A → B)∧ (B → C)) → (A → C) and (A → ¬A) → ¬A, the fusion connective and the Ackermann constant. An (...) overview over various ways to formulate Leibniz’s law in non-classical logics and two new triviality proofs for naïve set theory are also provided. (shrink)

It might be thought that we could argue for the consistency of a mathematical theory T within T, by giving an inductive argument that all theorems of T are true and inferring consistency. By Gödel's second incompleteness theorem any such argument must break down, but just how it breaks down depends on the kind of theory of truth that is built into T. The paper surveys the possibilities, and suggests that some theories of truth give far more intuitive diagnoses of (...) the breakdown than do others. The paper concludes with some morals about the nature of validity and about a possible alternative to the idea that mathematical theories are indefinitely extensible. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This article is a preliminary presentation of conjunctive paraconsistency, the claim that there might be non-explosive true contradictions, but contradictory propositions cannot be considered separately true. In case of true ‘p and not p’, the conjuncts must be held untrue, Simplification fails. The conjunctive approach is dual to non-adjunctive conceptions of inconsistency, informed by the idea that there might be cases in which a proposition is true and its negation is true too, but the conjunction is untrue, Adjunction fails. While (...) non-adjunctivism is a well-known option, the other view is not so much studied nowadays, but it was not unknown in the tradition, and there are some positive suggestions, in recent literature, that the position is plausible and deserves to be developed. The article compares conjunctivism, non-adjunctivism and dialetheism, then focuses on some possible justifications, costs and benefits of the conjunctive view. (shrink)

Jenkins (2007) charges that the language advanced in Beall (2007) is either expressively impoverished, or inconsistent. We argue that Jenkins’ objections are based on unreasonably strong constraints on formal theories of truth. Our primary concern is not to defend the ‘paranormal’ framework advanced in Beall, but to respond to a common – and implausible – ‘revenge’-style charge directed at a certain class of formal theories of truth and paradox.

An attractive approach to the semantic paradoxes holds that cases of semantic pathology give rise to indeterminacy. What attitude should a rational agent have toward a proposition that it takes to be indeterminate in this sense? Orthodoxy holds that rationality requires that an agent disbelieve such a proposition. I argue that a rational agent should be such that it is indeterminate whether it believes the proposition in question. For rational agents, indeterminacy in the objects of their attitudes will filter up (...) to the attitudes themselves. (shrink)

I provide an interpretation of Wittgenstein's much criticized remarks on Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem in the light of paraconsistent arithmetics: in taking Gödel's proof as a paradoxical derivation, Wittgenstein was right, given his deliberate rejection of the standard distinction between theory and metatheory. The reasoning behind the proof of the truth of the Gödel sentence is then performed within the formal system itself, which turns out to be inconsistent. I show that the models of paraconsistent arithmetics (obtained via the Meyer-Mortensen (...) collapsing filter on the standard model) match with many intuitions underlying Wittgensteins philosophy of mathematics, such as its strict finitism and the insistence on the decidability of any meaningful mathematical question. (shrink)

In this paper, we distinguish two versions of Curry's paradox: c-Curry, the standard conditional-Curry paradox, and v-Curry, a validity-involving version of Curry's paradox that isn’t automatically solved by solving c-curry. A unified treatment of curry paradox thus calls for a unified treatment of both c-Curry and v-Curry. If, as is often thought, c-Curry paradox is to be solved via non-classical logic, then v-Curry may require a lesson about the structure—indeed, the substructure—of the validity relation itself.

There are some properties, like being bald, for which it is vague where the boundary between the things that have it and the things that do not lies. A number of arguments threaten to show that such properties can still be associated with determinate and knowable boundaries: not between the things that have it and those that don’t, but between the things such that it is borderline at some order whether they have it and the things for which it is (...) not. I argue that these arguments, if successful, turn on a contentious principle in the logic of determinacy: Brouwer’s Principle, that every truth is determinately not determinately false. Other paradoxes which do not appear to turn on this principle often tacitly make assumptions about assertion, knowledge and higher-order vagueness. In this paper I’ll show how one can avoid sharp higher-order boundaries by rejecting these assumptions. (shrink)

A number of authors have objected to the application of non-classical logic to problems in philosophy on the basis that these non-classical logics are usually characterised by a classical metatheory. In many cases the problem amounts to more than just a discrepancy; the very phenomena responsible for non-classicality occur in the field of semantics as much as they do elsewhere. The phenomena of higher order vagueness and the revenge liar are just two such examples. The aim of this paper is (...) to show that a large class of non-classical logics are strong enough to formulate their own model theory in a corresponding non-classical set theory. Specifically I show that adequate definitions of validity can be given for the propositional calculus in such a way that the metatheory proves, in the specified logic, that every theorem of the propositional fragment of that logic is validated. It is shown that in some cases it may fail to be a classical matter whether a given sentence is valid or not. One surprising conclusion for non-classical accounts of vagueness is drawn: there can be no axiomatic, and therefore precise, system which is determinately sound and complete. (shrink)

This volume includes a target paper, taking up the challenge to revive, within a modern (formal) framework, a medieval solution to the Liar Paradox which did ...

In the fifth of his John Locke Lectures, Robert Brandom takes up the challenge to define a formal semantics for modelling conceptual contents according to his normative analysis of linguistic practices. The project is to exploit the notion of incompatibility in order to directly define a modally robust relation of entailment. Unfortunately, it can be proved that, in the original definition, the modal system represented by Incompatibility Semantics (IS) collapses into propositional calculus. In this paper I show how IS can (...) be technically amended so to overcome this failure: the required modifications are already known and consist in adapting and including the main notions of Kripke's standard framework of possible worlds. I also show that the modifications do not jeopardize Brandom's original project. (shrink)

This special issue collects together nine new essays on logical consequence :the relation obtaining between the premises and the conclusion of a logically valid argument. The present paper is a partial, and opinionated,introduction to the contemporary debate on the topic. We focus on two influential accounts of consequence, the model-theoretic and the proof-theoretic, and on the seeming platitude that valid arguments necessarilypreserve truth. We briefly discuss the main objections these accounts face, as well as Hartry Field’s contention that such objections (...) show consequenceto be a primitive, indefinable notion, and that we must reject the claim that valid arguments necessarily preserve truth. We suggest that the accountsin question have the resources to meet the objections standardly thought to herald their demise and make two main claims: (i) that consequence, as opposed to logical consequence, is the epistemologically significant relation philosophers should be mainly interested in; and (ii) that consequence is a paradoxical notion if truth is. (shrink)

We argue that it would seem to be a mistake to blame Liar-like paradox on certain features of the object language, since the effect can be created with very minimal object languages that contain none of the usual suspects (truth-like predicates, reference to their own truth-bearers, negation, etc.).