Semantic indeterminacy is the ether of philosophy of language. It fills the interstices of our intentions and pervades accounts of presupposition, tense, fiction, translation, and especially, vagueness. Yet semantic indeterminacy is as impossible as ectoplasm. Indeed, more so! The demonstration need only borrow a few assumptions used elsewhere in widely accepted impossibility results. Since an impossibility is never a necessary condition for anything actual, semantic indeterminacy must be superfluous. Language is no more explained by semantic indeterminacy than calculus is explained (...) by (pre-Robinsonian) infinitesimals. (shrink)

The traditional and prevailing definition of lying is that lying is some variation or combination of: “an untruth told with intent to deceive.” I establish that this is the case, and that, as a result, contradictions and injustices arise. An alternative definition is proposed which is shown to avoid these difficulties. It is also shown that and how on the new definition the alleged “Liar paradox” is easily dissolved.

We present a strategy to dissolve semantic paradoxes which proceeds from an explanation of why paradoxical sentences or their definitions are semantically defective. This explanation is compatible with the acceptability of impredicative definitions, self-referential sentences and semantically closed languages and leaves the status of the so-called truth-teller sentence unaffected. It is based on platitudes which encode innocuous constraints on successful definition and successful expression of propositional content. We show that the construction of liar paradoxes and of certain versions of Curry’s (...) paradox rests on presuppositions that violate these innocuous constraints. Other versions of Curry’s paradox are shown not to be paradoxical at all once their presuppositions are made explicit. Part of what we say rehearses a proposal originally made by Laurence Goldstein in 1985. Like Goldstein we dispose of certain paradoxes by rejecting some of the premises from which they must be taken to proceed. However, we disagree with his more recent view that the premises to be rejected are neither true nor false. (shrink)

We present a strategy to dissolve semantic paradoxes which proceeds from an explanation of why paradoxical sentences or their definitions are semantically defective. This explanation is compatible with the acceptability of impredicative definitions, self-referential sentences and semantically closed languages and leaves the status of the so-called truth-teller sentence unaffected. It is based on platitudes which encode innocuous constraints on successful definition and successful expression of propositional content. We show that the construction of liar paradoxes and of certain versions of Curry's (...) paradox rests on presuppositions that violate these innocuous constraints. Other versions of Curry's paradox are shown not to be paradoxical at all once their presuppositions are made explicit. Part of what we say rehearses a proposal originally made by Laurence Goldstein in 1985. Like Goldstein we dispose of certain paradoxes by rejecting some of the premises from which they must be taken to proceed. However, we disagree with his more recent view that the premises to be rejected are neither true nor false. (shrink)

The Surprise Exam Paradox continues to perplex and torment despite the many solutions that have been offered. This paper proposes to end the intrigue once and for all by refuting one of the central pillars of the Surprise Exam Paradox, the 'No Friday Argument,' which concludes that an exam given on the last day of the testing period cannot be a surprise. This refutation consists of three arguments, all of which are borrowed from the literature: the 'Unprojectible Announcement Argument,' the (...) 'Wright & Sudbury Argument,' and the 'Epistemic Blindspot Argument.' The reason that the Surprise Exam Paradox has persisted this long is not because any of these arguments is problematic. On the contrary, each of them is correct. The reason that it has persisted so long is because each argument is only part of the solution. The correct solution requires all three of them to be combined together. Once they are, we may see exactly why the No Friday Argument fails and therefore why we have a solution to the Surprise Exam Paradox that should stick. (shrink)

In a series of articles, Dan Lopez De Sa and Elia Zardini argue that several theorists have recently employed instances of paradoxical reasoning, while failing to see its problematic nature because it does not immediately (or obviously) yield inconsistency. In contrast, Lopez De Sa and Zardini claim that resultant inconsistency is not a necessary condition for paradoxicality. It is our contention that, even given their broader understanding of paradox, their arguments fail to undermine the instances of reasoning they attack, either (...) because they fail to see everything that is at work in that reasoning, or because they misunderstand what it is that the reasoning aims to show. (shrink)

In ‘A Consistent Way with Paradox’, Laurence Goldstein (2009) clarifies his solution to the liar, which he touts as revenge immune . In addition, he (Ibid.) responds to one of the objections that Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2006) raise against certain solutions to the open pair and argues that his proffered solution to the liar family of paradoxes undermines what they (Ibid.) call the dialetheic conjecture . In this paper, after critically evaluating Goldstein’s response to A-G&W, I turn to his proposed (...) solution to the liar paradox, where I show that it is difficult to see how it manages to avoid that conjecture. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, Graham Priest has ably presented and defended dialetheism, the view that certain sentences are properly characterized as true with true negations. Our goal here is neither to quibble with the tenability of true, assertable contradictions nor, really, with the arguments for dialetheism. Rather, we wish to address the dialetheist's treatment of cases of semantic pathology and to pose a worry for dialetheism that has not been adequately considered. The problem that we present seems to have (...) broader bite, afflicting both consistent and inconsistent proposals for resolving semantic pathology. Thus, while our primary goal is to uncover some important connections between dialetheism, semantic pathology, and other, more general issues, the problem that we pose might be a worry for anyone who aims to resolve semantic pathology - consistently or not. (shrink)

This article reveals a tension between a fairly standard response to "liar sentences," of which -/- (L) Sentence (L) -/- is not true is an instance, and some features of our natural language determiners (e.g., 'every,' 'some,' 'no,' etc.) that have been established by formal linguists. The fairly standard response to liar sentences, which has been voiced by a number of philosophers who work directly on the Liar paradox (e.g., Parsons [1974], Kripke [1975], Burge [1979], Goldstein [1985, 2009], Gaifman [1992, (...) 2000]), Glanzberg [2004], Azzouni [2006], and others), but can also be heard from philosophers who do not work directly on that paradox, is that liar sentences do not express propositions. Call this the "No Proposition View" (hereafter NPV). Evidently, the belief that liar sentences do not express propositions is a deeply held intuition. As the previously mentioned tension will reveal, there is reason to worry about whether this deeply held intuition can be sustained. (shrink)