Scholastic and analytic definitions of semantic paradoxes, in terms of groundlessness, circularity, and semantic pathology, are introduced and compared with each other. The fundamental intuitions used in these definitions are the concepts of being true about extralinguistic reality, of making statements about one’s self, and of compatibility with an underlying semantic theory. The three approaches—the groundlessness view, the circularity view, and the semantic pathology view—are shown to differ not only conceptually, but also in their applications. As both a means for (...) showing these differences and as an adequacytest, the so-called two-line puzzles are used, which allows one to address the possibility of making non-paradoxical statements about paradoxical sentences within the same language. (shrink)

Besides the usual business of solving paradoxes, there has been recent philosophical work on their essential nature. Lycan characterises a paradox as “an inconsistent set of propositions, each of which is very plausible.” Building on this definition, Paseau offers a numerical measure of paradoxicality of a set of principles: a function of the degrees to which a subject believes the principles considered individually (all typically high) and of the degree to which the subject believes the principles considered together (typically low). (...) We argue (a) that Paseau's measure fails to score certain paradoxes properly and (b) that this failure is not due to the particular measure but rather that any such function just of credences fails to adequately capture paradoxicality. Our analysis leads us to conclude that Lycan's definition also fails to capture the notion of paradox. (shrink)

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel develops a subtle analysis of Megarian paradoxes: the Liar, the Veiled Man and the Sorites. In this paper, we focus on Hegel's interpretation of...