In my “Deep Inconsistency”, I compared my meaning-inconsistency view on the liar with Graham Priest’s dialetheist view, using my view to help cast doubt on Priest’s arguments for his view. Jc Beall and Priest have recently published a reply to my article. I here respond to their criticisms. In addition, I compare the meaning–inconsistency view with Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap’s revision theory of truth, and discuss how best to deal with the strengthened liar.

In his “Deep Inconsistency?” Eklund attacks arguments to the effect that some contradictions are true, and especially those based on the liar paradox, to be found in Priest’ In Contradiction. The point of this paper is to evaluate his case.

Aristotle is perhaps the most important figure in philosophy. Every serious reader of philosophy will come across the Metaphysics , yet until now there has not been an introductory book to help explain the often difficult ideas that arise in the text. This GuideBook looks at the Metaphysics thematically and takes the reader through the main arguments found in the book. The book introduces and assesses Aristotle's life and the background to the Metaphysics, the ideas and text of the Metaphysics (...) and Aristotle's philosophical legacy. (shrink)

A systematic overview of modern metaphysics, A Survey of Metaphysics covers all of the most important topics in the field. It adopts the fairly traditional conception of metaphysics as a subject that deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. The book is divided into six main sections that address the following themes: identity and change, necessity and essence, causation, agency and events, space and time, and universals and particulars. It (...) focuses on contemporary views and issues throughout, rather than on the history of metaphysics. (shrink)

Approaches to paraconsistency can be arranged on a spectrum similar to the way in which approaches to vagueness are often understood. On the left are the metaphysical realists; those who think that there are real contradictory facts, that are mind and language independent. On the right are those who think that although we can have inconsistent beliefs and inconsistent theories — and we need a paraconsistent logic to deal with them — the world itself is perfectly consistent. In the middle (...) are the semantic dialetheists, who claim that there are true contradictions, but that these come about because of particular features of our use of language. This chapter outlines a particular version of semantic dialetheism based on a four-valued logic. It contends that although we need such a logic to deal with our current language, we could regiment our uses of predicates (and other expressions) to eliminate all true contradictions. (shrink)