Abstract
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.
Thanks to Graham Priest, Anil Gupta and to the other participants and organizers of both BW7 | Seventh Barcelona Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Reference: Paradoxes of Truth and Denotation (LOGOS: Logic, Language, and Cognition Research Group, Universitat de Barcelona) and Truth at Work (IHPST: Institut d’Historie et de Philosophie des Sciences et Techniques, Université Paris-1, et Ecole Normale Supérieure) for helpful (and enjoyable) comments and discussion.
Both authors contributed equally to this work and are listed in alphabetical order.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This is in marked contrast with Woodbridge (2005), where a dialetheic approach to the Liar Paradox is endorsed within an earlier version of the sort of pretense account of truth-talk that we currently champion.
- 2.
While not explicitly formulating the thesis in this way, Yablo (2005) relies on something like (EI) to argue for a particular fictionalist account of mathematical discourse.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
As seems clear, an ETF account of truth-talk would be intolerable, as it would render false all truth attributions, thereby undermining the status of the T-schema, since not every instance of it would be true.
- 6.
The source of the semantic pretense approach is Kendall Walton’s (1990, 1993) analyses of representation in the arts and of certain kinds of metaphor in terms of make-believe. Walton applies a semantic pretense approach explicitly in his analyses of talk about works of fiction and fictional entities and of existence-talk. See Evans (1982) for a different but related semantic pretense account of existence-talk.
- 7.
- 8.
In order to deflect a possible misinterpretation, we should make clear that we are not saying that being true is a matter of being pretended true. There is an important difference between claiming something is true—and the pretenses always involved in such a claim—and pretending that something is true. When we claim, or assert, (e.g.) that a given sentence is true, we are not pretending that it is true. On our view—and this is in line with T-deflationism—we are indirectly expressing a commitment to what that sentence says.
- 9.
For present purposes, this is taken to be equivalent to (ES*) That p is true iff p.
- 10.
For more on the details behind T-deflationism, see Armour-Garb (2012).
- 11.
For more on this view, see Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2010,2015). We should note that this understanding of the relationship between deflationism and pretense contrasts with that at work in Woodbridge (2005), where the pretense view is presented as a species of deflationism, in competition with other species.
- 12.
Cf. Gupta (1993).
- 13.
For more on this, see Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015).
- 14.
The same goes for wide-scope negation liar sentences, e.g., (L*) It is not the case that (L*) is not true.
- 15.
This allows for a possible contrast between Strawson’s (1950) sentence,‘This is a fine red one’ and Chomsky’s (1957) sentence, ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’. The latter sentence is not even understood2, if we insist that to understand2 a sentence, we need to know how that sentence could be used to make a true assertion. We should note that, although we are inclined to accept this condition, we need not insist on it, for the points in this paper to go through.
- 16.
Analogous to the two modes of understanding, we might also grant two modes of meaning. As we would describe things, since liar sentences do not specify any M-conditions, we will not grant that they are meaningful1, though we will, and should, allow that they are meaningful2. For more on this, see Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2013, 2015).
- 17.
- 18.
To be sure, there is more that we might say about this notion of s-defectiveness, which we are importing into our vocabulary. But what is crucial here is that ‘s-defective’ applies directly to sentences—actually, to sentence tokens, though the view will not end up looking like a tokenist view, at least in any interesting sense—rather than applying to what a given sentence expresses or applying to a sentence in virtue of applying to what it expresses. Moreover, the expression, ‘s-defective’, applies to sentences that do not possess content, even though such sentences will (or, at least, may) be understood2.
- 19.
See Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2006).
References
Armour-Garb, B. (2012). Deflationism (about theories of truth). Philosophical Compass, 7, 267–277.
Armour-Garb, B., & Woodbridge, J. (2006). Dialetheism, semantic pathology, and the open pair. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84, 395–416.
Armour-Garb, B., & Woodbridge, J. (2010). Why deflationists should be pretense theorists (and perhaps already are). In N. Pedersen & C. Wright (Eds.), New waves in truth (pp. 59–77). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Armour-Garb, B., & Woodbridge, J. (2012). The story about propositions. Noûs, 46, 635–674.
Armour-Garb, B., & Woodbridge, J. (2013). Semantic defectiveness and the liar. Philosophical Studies, 164, 845–863.
Armour-Garb, B., & Woodbridge, J. (2014). From mathematical fictionalism to truth-theoretic fictionalism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88, 93–118.
Armour-Garb, B., & Woodbridge, J. (2015). Pretense and pathology: philosophical fictionalism and its applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (forthcoming).
Brandom, R. (1994). Making it explicit. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Crimmins, M. (1998). Hesperus and phosphorus: Sense, pretense, and reference. Philosophical Review, 107, 1–47.
Evans, G. (1982). The varieties of reference.(J. McDowell (Ed.)) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Field, H. (1994). Deflationist views of meaning and content. Mind, 103, 249–285.
Field, H. (2008). Saving truth from paradox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gupta, A. (1993). A critique of deflationism. Philosophical Topics, 21, 57–81.
Quine, W. (1986). Philosophy of logic (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Richard, M. (2000). Semantic Pretense In A. Everett & T. Hofweber (Eds.) Empty names, fiction, and the puzzles of non-existence (pp. 205–232). Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Strawson, P. (1950). On referring. Mind, 59, 320–344.
Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Walton, K. (1993). Metaphor and prop-oriented make-believe. European Journal of Philosophy, 1, 39–56.
Woodbridge, J. (2005). Truth as a pretense. In M. Kalderon (Ed.) Fictionalism in metaphysics (pp. 134–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woodbridge, J., & Armour-Garb, B. (2008). The pathology of validity. Synthese, 160, 63–74.
Woodbridge, J., & Armour-Garb, B. (2009). Linguistic puzzles and semantic pretense. In S. Sawyer (Ed.), New waves in philosophy of language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Yablo, S. (2001). Go figure: A path through fictionalism. Midwest studies in philosophy. (XXV: Figurative Language), 72–102.
Yablo, S. (2005). The myth of the seven. In M. Kalderon (Ed.) Fictionalism in metaphysics (pp. 88–115). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Armour-Garb, B., Woodbridge, J. (2015). Truth, Pretense and the Liar Paradox. In: Achourioti, T., Galinon, H., Martínez Fernández, J., Fujimoto, K. (eds) Unifying the Philosophy of Truth. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9673-6_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9673-6_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9672-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9673-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)