Unsettled Problems with Vague Truth

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 25 (1):103 - 117 (1995)
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Abstract

A tempting solution to problems of semantic vagueness and to the Liar Paradox is an appeal to truth-value gaps. It is tempting to say, for example, that, where Harry is a borderline case of bald, the sentenceHarry is baldis neither true nor false: it is in the ‘gap’ between these two values, and perhaps deserves a third truth-value. Similarly with the Liar Paradox. Consider the following Liar sentence: is false.That is, sentence says of itself that it is false. If we accept the Tarskian schema S is true iff pwhere ‘S’ is a name of a sentence ‘p,’ we are led into paradox. Both the assumption that is true, and the assumption that is false lead us, via, to is true if and only if is false.Given this result, a natural reaction is to place in a ‘gap’ between true and false.

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Andrew Mills
Otterbein College

Citations of this work

A Correspondence Theory of Truth.Jay Newhard - 2002 - Dissertation, Brown University

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References found in this work

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1969 - New York: Columbia University Press.
Outline of a theory of truth.Saul Kripke - 1975 - Journal of Philosophy 72 (19):690-716.
Epistemology Naturalized.W. V. Quine - 1969 - In Willard Van Orman Quine (ed.), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
Vagueness, truth and logic.Kit Fine - 1975 - Synthese 30 (3-4):265-300.
The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy.Michael Dummett - 1984 - Philosophical Quarterly 34 (136):402-414.

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