Most work on the semantic paradoxes within classical logic has centered around what this essay calls “linguistic” accounts of the paradoxes: they attribute to sentences or utterances of sentences some property that is supposed to explain their paradoxical or nonparadoxical status. “No proposition” views are paradigm examples of linguistic theories, although practically all accounts of the paradoxes subscribe to some kind of linguistic theory. This essay shows that linguistic accounts of the paradoxes endorsing classical logic are subject to a particularly (...) acute form of the revenge paradox: that there is no exhaustive classification of sentences into “good” and “bad” such that the T-schema holds when restricted to the “good” sentences unless it is also possible to prove some “bad” sentences. The foundations for an alternative classical nonlinguistic approach is outlined that is not subject to the same kinds of problems. Although revenge paradoxes of different strengths can be formulated, they are found to be indeterminate at higher orders and not inconsistent. (shrink)

Revenge arguments purport to show that any proposed solution to the semantic paradoxes generates new paradoxes that prove that solution to be inadequate. In this paper, I focus on revenge arguments that employ the model-theoretic semantics of a target theory and I argue, contra the current revenge-theoretic wisdom, that they can constitute genuine expressive limitations. I consider the anti-revenge strategy elaborated by Field and argue that it does not offer a way out of the revenge (...) problem. More generally, I argue that the difference between ‘standard’ and ‘revenge’ paradoxes is ill-conceived and should be abandoned. This will contribute to show that the theories that provide a uniform account of truth and other semantic notions are the ones best equipped to avoid the paradoxes altogether—‘standard’ and ‘revenge’ alike. (shrink)

The Liar paradox raises foundational questions about logic, language, and truth (and semantic notions in general). A simple Liar sentence like 'This sentence is false' appears to be both true and false if it is either true or false. For if the sentence is true, then what it says is the case; but what it says is that it is false, hence it must be false. On the other hand, if the statement is false, then it is true, since (...) it says (only) that it is false. -/- How, then, should we classify Liar sentences? Are they true or false? A natural suggestion would be that Liars are neither true nor false; that is, they fall into a category beyond truth and falsity. This solution might resolve the initial problem, but it beckons the Liar's revenge. A sentence that says of itself only that it is false or beyond truth and falsity will, in effect, bring back the initial problem. The Liar's revenge is a witness to the hydra-like nature of Liars: in dealing with one Liar you often bring about another. -/- JC Beall presents fourteen new essays and an extensive introduction, which examine the nature of the Liar paradox and its resistance to any attempt to solve it. Written by some of the world's leading experts in the field, the papers in this volume will be an important resource for those working in truth studies, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language, as well as those with an interest in formal semantics and metaphysics. (shrink)

I argue for an account of semantic paradox that requires minimal logical revision. I first consider a phenomenon that is common to the paradoxes of definability, Russell’s paradox and the Liar. The phenomenon—which I call Repetition—is this: given a paradoxical expression, we can go on to produce a semantically unproblematic expression composed of the very same words. I argue that Kripke’s and Field’s theories of truth make heavy weather of Repetition, and suggest a simpler contextual account. I go (...) on to outline a ‘singularity’ theory of semantical predicates in the spirit of remarks of Gödel. According to this theory, ‘denotes’, ‘extension’ and ‘true’ are context-sensitive expression that apply almost everywhere on a given occasion of use, except for certain singular points. I then turn to revenge paradoxes, and argue that even the dialetheist is subject to revenge. I then examine how the singularity theory responds to revenge. (shrink)

The Liar paradox raises foundational questions about logic, language, and truth. A simple Liar sentence like 'This sentence is false' appears to be both true and false if it is either true or false. For if the sentence is true, then what it says is the case; but what it says is that it is false, hence it must be false. On the other hand, if the statement is false, then it is true, since it says that it is (...) false.How, then, should we classify Liar sentences? Are they true or false? A natural suggestion would be that Liars are neither true nor false; that is, they fall into a category beyond truth and falsity. This solution might resolve the initial problem, but it beckons the Liar's revenge. A sentence that says of itself only that it is false or beyond truth and falsity will, in effect, bring back the initial problem. The Liar's revenge is a witness to the hydra-like nature of Liars: in dealing with one Liar you often bring about another.JC Beall presents fourteen new essays and an extensive introduction, which examine the nature of the Liar paradox and its resistance to any attempt to solve it. Written by some of the world's leading experts in the field, the papers in this volume will be an important resource for those working in truth studies, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language, as well as those with an interest in formal semantics and metaphysics. (shrink)

The paper offers a solution to the semantic paradoxes, one in which (1) we keep the unrestricted truth schema “True(A)↔A”, and (2) the object language can include its own metalanguage. Because of the first feature, classical logic must be restricted, but full classical reasoning applies in “ordinary” contexts, including standard set theory. The more general logic that replaces classical logic includes a principle of substitutivity of equivalents, which with the truth schema leads to the general intersubstitutivity of True(A) with A (...) within the language.The logic is also shown to have the resources required to represent the way in which sentences (like the Liar sentence and the Curry sentence) that lead to paradox in classical logic are “defective”. We can in fact define a hierarchy of “defectiveness” predicates within the language. Contrary to claims that any solution to the paradoxes just breeds further paradoxes (“revenge problems”) involving defectiveness predicates, there is a general consistency/conservativeness proof that shows that talk of truth and the various “levels of defectiveness” can all be made coherent together within a single object language. (shrink)

A historically popular response to the liar paradox (“this sentence is false”) is to say that the liar sentence is meaningless (or semantically defective, or malfunctions, or…). Unfortunately, like all other supposed solutions to the liar, this approach faces a revenge challenge. Consider the revenge liar sentence, “this sentence is either meaningless or false”. If it is true, then it is either meaningless or false, so not true. And if it is not true, then it can’t be (...) either meaningless or false, so it must be true. Either way, we are back in a paradox. This paper provides a detailed and exhaustive discussion of the options for responding to revenge on behalf of “meaningless” theories. Though I attempt to discuss all of the options fairly, I will ultimately opt for one specific response and discuss some of its challenges. Various technical and logical matters will be discussed throughout the paper, but my focus will be philosophical, throughout. My overall conclusion is that the “meaningless” strategy is at least as well off in the face of revenge as any other approach to the liar and related paradoxes. (shrink)

The paradoxes of self-reference are genuinely paradoxical. The liar paradox, Russell’s paradox and their cousins pose enormous difficulties to anyone who seeks to give a comprehensive theory of semantics, or of sets, or of any other domain which allows a modicum of self-reference and a modest number of logical principles. One approach to the paradoxes of self-reference takes these paradoxes as motivating a non-classical theory of logical consequence. Similar logical principles are used in each of the paradoxical inferences. (...) If one or other of these problematic inferences are rejected, we may arrive at a consistent (or at least, a coherent) theory. In this paper I will show that such approaches come at a serious cost. The general approach of using the paradoxes to restrict the class of allowable inferences places severe constraints on the domain of possible propositional logics, and on the kind of metatheory that is appropriate in the study of logic itself. Proof-theoretic and model-theoretic analyses of logical consequence make provide different ways for non-classical responses to the paradoxes to be defeated by revenge problems: the redefinition of logical connectives thought to be ruled out on logical grounds. Non-classical solutions are not the “easy way out” of the paradoxes. (shrink)

It is “the received wisdom” that any intuitively natural and consistent resolution of a class of semantic paradoxes immediately leads to other paradoxes just as bad as the first. This is often called the “revenge problem”. Some proponents of the received wisdom draw the conclusion that there is no hope of any natural treatment that puts all the paradoxes to rest: we must either live with the existence of paradoxes that we are unable to treat, or adopt artificial and (...) ad hoc means to avoid them. Others (“dialetheists”) argue that we can put the paradoxes to rest, but only by licensing the acceptance of some contradictions (presumably in a paraconsistent logic that prevents the contradictions from spreading everywhere). (shrink)

Since Saul Kripke’s influential work in the 1970s, the revisionary approach to semantic paradox—the idea that semantic paradoxes must be solved by weakening classical logic—has been increasingly popular. In this paper, we present a new revenge argument to the effect that the main revisionary approaches breed new paradoxes that they are unable to block.

Is there a notion of contradiction—let us call it, for dramatic effect, “absolute”—making all contradictions, so understood, unacceptable also for dialetheists? It is argued in this paper that there is, and that spelling it out brings some theoretical benefits. First it gives us a foothold on undisputed ground in the methodologically difficult debate on dialetheism. Second, we can use it to express, without begging questions, the disagreement between dialetheists and their rivals on the nature of truth. Third, dialetheism has an (...) operator allowing it, against the opinion of many critics, to rule things out and manifest disagreement: for unlike other proposed exclusion-expressing-devices (for instance, the entailment of triviality), the operator used to formulate the notion of absolute contradiction appears to be immune both from crippling expressive limitations and from revenge paradoxes—pending a rigorous nontriviality proof for a formal dialetheic theory including it. (shrink)

How robust is a contraction-free approach to the semantic paradoxes? This paper aims to show some limitations with the approach based on multiplicative rules by presenting and discussing the significance of a revenge paradox using a predicate representing an alethic modality defined with infinitary rules.

The vast majority of putative solutions to the liar paradox face the infamous revenge problem. In recent work, however, Kevin Scharp has extensively developed an exciting and highly novel “inconsistency approach” to the paradox that, he claims, does not face revenge. If Scharp is right, then this represents a significant step forward in our attempts to solve the liar paradox. However, in this paper, I raise a revenge problem that faces Scharp's inconsistency approach.

Although there has been a recent swell of interest in theories of truth that attempt solutions to the liar paradox and the other paradoxes affecting our concept of truth, many of these theories have been criticized for generating new paradoxes, called revenge paradoxes. The criticism is that the theories of truth in question are inadequate because they only work for languages lacking in the resources to generate revenge paradoxes. Theorists facing these objections offer a range of replies, (...) and the matter seems now to be at a standoff. I aim, first, to bolster the revenge objections by considering a relation, internalizability, between languages and theories of truth. A theory of truth is internalizable for a language iff there is an extension of that language in which the theory is expressible and for which the theory provides an accurate and complete assignment of semantic values. There are good reasons to think that acceptable theories of truth are internalizable for any language. With this internalizability requirement in hand, I argue that properly formulated revenge objections are decisive and that the replies to them are inadequate. Second, I show that the internalizability requirement can be met by a certain theory of truth. The central claim of this theory is that truth is an inconsistent concept and should be replaced with a pair of consistent concepts that can then be used to provide a semantics for our truth predicates. This theory is compatible with classical logic, does not give rise to revenge paradoxes of any kind, and satisfies the internalizability requirement. (shrink)

Note: This is a "pre-review" version, not the final version that will be published. -/- In “Nothing is True,” Will Gamester defends a form of alethic nihilism that still grants truth-talk a kind of legitimacy: an expressive role that is implemented via a pretense. He argues that this view has all of the strengths of deflationism, while also providing an elegant resolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. For the alethic nihilist, Liar and related sentences are not true, (...) and that is the end of the story. No contradiction arises because it does not thereby follow that any of these sentences are also true, since nothing is. Gamester concludes that the simplicity of this response to the semantic paradoxes makes alethic nihilism an attractive approach. We disagree. In addition to providing insurmountable obstacles for his form of alethic nihilism, we contend that a certain form of non-nihilist deflationism is better placed to deal with the paradoxes and to account for truth-talk more generally. (shrink)

I use the principle of truth-maker maximalism to provide a new solution to the semantic paradoxes. According to the solution, AUS, its undecidable whether paradoxical sentences are grounded or ungrounded. From this it follows that their alethic status is undecidable. We cannot assert, in principle, whether paradoxical sentences are true, false, either true or false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. AUS involves no ad hoc modification of logic, denial of the T-schema's validity, or obvious (...) revenge. (shrink)

According to ‘paracomplete’ theorists like Hartry Field, there are some sentences (such as sentences that attribute untruth to themselves) about which we should reject the relevant instances of the Law of the Excluded Middle without accepting their negations. The central alleged advantage of this approach over other consistent solutions to the Liar Paradox—for example, the view that Liars have some third truth-value other than ‘true’ or ‘false’—lies in its apparently superior ability to avoid ‘revenge paradoxes’. I argue, however, (...) that this advantage is illusory. The paracomplete theorist faces revenge problems of their own. (shrink)

An important suggestion of objective Bayesians is that the maximum entropy principle can replace a principle which is known to get into paradoxical difficulties: the principle of indifference. No one has previously determined whether the maximum entropy principle is better able to solve Bertrand’s chord paradox than the principle of indifference. In this paper I show that it is not. Additionally, the course of the analysis brings to light a new paradox, a revenge paradox of the (...) chords, that is unique to the maximum entropy principle. (shrink)

It is often argued that fully structural theories of truth and related notions are incapable of expressing a nonstratified notion of defectiveness. We argue that recently much-discussed non-contractive theories suffer from the same expressive limitation, provided they identify the defective sentences with the sentences that yield triviality if they are assumed to satisfy structural contraction.

We present a revenge argument for non-reflexive theories of semantic notions – theories which restrict the rule of assumption, or initial sequents of the form φ ⊩ φ. Our strategy follows the general template articulated in Murzi and Rossi [21]: we proceed via the definition of a notion of paradoxicality for non-reflexive theories which in turn breeds paradoxes that standard non-reflexive theories are unable to block.

It is not uncommon among theorists favoring a deviant logic on account of the semantic paradoxes to subscribe to an idea that has come to be known as ‘classical recapture’. The main thought underpinning it is that non-classical logicians are justified in endorsing many instances of the classically valid principles that they reject. Classical recapture promises to yield an appealing pair of views: one can attain naivety for semantic concepts while retaining classicality in ordinary domains such as mathematics. However, Julien (...) Murzi and Lorenzo Rossi have recently suggested that revisionary approaches to truth breed revenge paradoxes when they are coupled with the thought that classical reasoning can be recaptured in certain circumstances. What’s novel about the paradoxes they put forward is that they cannot be dismissed so easily. The concepts used to generate these paradoxes—those of paradoxicality and unparadoxicality—are concepts that non-classical theorists need in order to offer a diagnosis of the truth-theoretic paradoxes. My goal in this paper is to argue that non-classical theorists can represent the concept of paradoxicality without falling prey to revenge paradoxes. In particular, I will show how to provide a formal fixed-point semantics for a language extended with a paradoxicality predicate that adequately expresses the non-classical logician’s notion of paradoxicality. (shrink)

I present a paradoxical combination of desires. I show why it's paradoxical, and consider ways of responding. The paradox saddles us with an unappealing trilemma: either we reject the possibility of the case by placing surprising restrictions on what we can desire, or we deny plausibly constitutive principles linking desires to the conditions under which they are satisfied, or we revise some bit of classical logic. I argue that denying the possibility of the case is unmotivated on any reasonable (...) way of thinking about mental content, and rejecting those desire-satisfaction principles leads to revenge paradoxes. So the best response is a non-classical one, according to which certain desires are neither determinately satisfied nor determinately not satisfied. Thus, theorizing about paradoxical propositional attitudes helps constrain the space of possibilities for adequate solutions to semantic paradoxes more generally. (shrink)

Given any proposition, is it possible to have rationally acceptable attitudes towards it? Absent reasons to the contrary, one would probably think that this should be possible. In this paper I provide a reason to the contrary. There is a proposition such that, if one has any opinions about it at all, one will have a rationally unacceptable set of propositional attitudes—or if one doesn’t, one will end up being cognitively imperfect in some other manner. The proposition I am concerned (...) with is a self-referential propositional attitude ascription involving the propositional attitude of rejection. Given a basic assumption about what constitutes irrationality, and a few assumptions about the nature of cognitively ideal agents, a paradox results. This paradox is superficially like the Liar, but it is importantly different in that no alethic notions are involved at all. As such, it stands independent of the Liar and is not a ‘revenge’ version of it. After setting out the paradox I discuss possible responses. After considering several I argue that one is best off simply accepting that the paradox shows us something surprising and interesting about rationality: that some cognitive shortfall is unavoidable even for ideal agents. I argue that nothing disastrous follows from accepting this conclusion. (shrink)

I express my dissatisfaction with the common ways to treat the semantic paradoxes. Not only do they give rise to revenge paradoxes, they ignore the wisdom contained in the ordinary reaction to paradoxes. I instead propose an account that vindicates the ordinary reaction to paradox by putting the blame on us philosophers. It is the wrong conception of what a valid inference is, one that is central to “the ideal of deductive logic” that gives rise to the problem. (...) The solution outlined gives us a new way to accept defeat in light of the paradoxes: the arguments that lead to them are based on valid forms of reasoning, but their conclusions are nonetheless rationally rejected. (shrink)

This book aims to provide a solution to the semantic paradoxes. It argues for a unified solution to the paradoxes generated by our concepts of denotation, predicate extension, and truth. The solution makes two main claims. The first is that our semantic expressions 'denotes', 'extension' and 'true' are context-sensitive. The second, inspired by a brief, tantalizing remark of Godel's, is that these expressions are significant everywhere except for certain singularities, in analogy with division by zero. A formal theory of singularities (...) is presented and applied to a wide variety of versions of the definability paradoxes, Russell's paradox, and the Liar paradox. Keith Simmons argues that the singularity theory satisfies the following desiderata: it recognizes that the proper setting of the semantic paradoxes is natural language, not regimented formal languages; it minimizes any revision to our semantic concepts; it respects as far as possible Tarski's intuition that natural languages are universal; it responds adequately to the threat of revenge paradoxes; and it preserves classical logic and semantics. Simmons draws out the consequences of the singularity theory for deflationary views of our semantic concepts, and concludes that if we accept the singularity theory, we must reject deflationism. (shrink)

When I first came across Robert Nozick′s Philosophical Explanations I was struck by the purity of his justification of punishment. Most latter-day retributivists are crypto-utilitarians, claiming to find some sort of benefit in penalties, even if it is only symbolic. Nozick too sees punishment as symbolic, but not as having any necessary utility. Paradoxically, perhaps, he is one of the few retributivists who insists that it matters what the offender makes of his penalty. Even more interesting is the importance he (...) attaches to the analogy between retribution and revenge. Most retributivists are at pains to distance themselves from vengeance: but not Nozick. (shrink)

It is often said that in a purely formal perspective, intuitionistic logic has no obvious advantage to deal with the liar-type paradoxes. In this paper, we will argue that the standard intuitionistic natural deduction systems are vulnerable to the liar-type paradoxes in the sense that the acceptance of the liar-type sentences results in inference to absurdity (⊥). The result shows that the restriction of the Double Negation Elimination (DNE) fails to block the inference to ⊥. It is, however, not the (...) problem of the intuitionistic approaches to the liar-type paradoxes but the lack of expressive power of the standard intuitionistic natural deduction system. We introduce a meta-level negation for a given system and a meta-level absurdity, ⋏, to the intuitionistic system. We shall show that in the system, the inference to ⊥ is not given without the assumption that the system is complete. Moreover, we consider the Double Meta-Level Negation Elimination rules (DMNE) which implicitly assume the completeness of the system. Then, the restriction of DMNE can rule out the inference to ⊥. (shrink)

The Revenge Problem threatens every approach to the semantic paradoxes that proceeds by introducing nonclassical semantic values. Given any such collection Δ of additional semantic values, one can construct a Revenge sentence:This sentence is either false or has a value in Δ.TheEmbracing Revengeview, developed independently by Roy T. Cook and Phlippe Schlenker, addresses this problem by suggesting that the class of nonclassical semantic values is indefinitely extensible, with each successive Revenge sentence introducing a new ‘pathological’ semantic value (...) into the discourse. The view is explicitly motivated in terms of the idea that every notion thatseemsto be expressible should, if at all possible,beexpressible. Extant work on the Embracing Revenge view has failed to live up to this promise, since the formal languages developed within such work are expressively impoverished. We rectify this here by developing a much richer formal language, and semantics for that language, and we then prove an extremely powerful expressive completeness result for the system in question. (shrink)

Consideration of a paradox originally discovered by John Buridan provides a springboard for a general solution to paradoxes within the Liar family. The solution rests on a philosophical defence of truth-value-gaps and is consistent (non-dialetheist), avoids ‘revenge’ problems, imports no ad hoc assumptions, is not applicable to only a proper subset of the semantic paradoxes and implies no restriction of the expressive capacities of language.

The sentences employed in semantic paradoxes display a wide range of semantic behaviours. However, the main theories of truth currently available either fail to provide a theory of paradox altogether, or can only account for some paradoxical phenomena by resorting to multiple interpretations of the language. In this paper, I explore the wide range of semantic behaviours displayed by paradoxical sentences, and I develop a unified theory of truth and paradox, that is a theory of truth that also (...) provides a unified account of paradoxical sentences. The theory I propose here yields a threefold classification of paradoxical sentences – liar-like sentences, truth-teller-like sentences, and revenge sentences. Unlike existing treatments of semantic paradox, the theory put forward in this paper yields a way of interpreting all three kinds of paradoxical sentences, as well as unparadoxical sentences, within a single model. (shrink)

Consider the following argument written on the board in room 227: 1 = 1. So, the argument on the board in room 227 is not valid. This argument generates a paradox. The aim of this paper is to present a resolution of this paradox and related paradoxes of validity, including a version of the Curry paradox. The proposal stresses the close connections between these validity paradoxes and paradoxes of truth and paradoxes of denotation. So a more general (...) aim is to provide a unified response to semantic paradox. The positive proposal is in part inspired by a brief, tantalizing suggestion of Gödel’s, that the paradoxes might appear “as something analogous to dividing by zero”—so that the concept of validity, for example, is everywhere applicable except for certain singular points or singularities. A second central claim is that ‘valid’ is a context-sensitive predicate. The key notions of this contextual-singularity theory are presented and applied to a variety of cases. Any purported solution to paradox must deal with the phenomenon of revenge, and a response to revenge is outlined. The paper closes with remarks about the accommodation of Tarski’s claim that natural languages are universal. (shrink)

“To this day, partiality approaches to the paradox have been dogged by the so-called ‘Strengthened Liar’. .... The Strengthened Liar observes that if we follow a partiality theorist and declare the Liar sentence* neither true nor false (or failing to express a proposition,. or suffering from some sort of grave semantic defect), then the paradox is only pushed back. For we can go on to conclude that whatever this status may be, it implies that the Liar sentence is (...) not true. This claim is true, but it is just the Liar sentence again.* We are back in paradox.” (Glanzberg 2002, p. 468, bold emphasis added.) Cf.: “We are back in our contradiction,”(Glanzberg 2001, p. 222). *The Liar sentence intended is evidently the sentence ‘the Liar sentence is not true’, and, the Liar sentence = ‘the Liar sentence is not true’. Cf.: “Consider a Liar sentence: ...let us take a sentence l which says l is not true. We can, informally, reason as.. (shrink)

The Embracing Revenge account of semantic paradox avoids the expressive limitations of previous approaches based on the Kripkean fixed point construction by replacing a single language with an indefinitely extensible sequence of languages, each of which contains the resources to fully characterize the semantics of the previous languages. In this paper we extend the account developed in Cook, Cook, Schlenker, and Tourville and Cook via the addition of intensional operators such as ``is paradoxical''. In this extended framework we (...) are able to characterize the difference between sentences, such as the Liar and the Truth-teller, that receive the same semantic value in minimal fixed points yet seem to involve distinct semantic phenomena. (shrink)

There is a standard objection against purported explanations of how a language L can express the notion of being a true sentence of L. According to this objection, such explanations avoid one paradox (the Liar) only to succumb to another of the same kind. Even if L can contain its own truth predicate, we can identify another notion it cannot express, on pain of contradiction via Liar-like reasoning. This paper seeks to undermine such ‘revenge’ by arguing that it (...) presupposes a dubious assumption about the linguistic expression of concepts. Successful revenge would require that there be a notion other than truth that plays the same role with respect to concept-expression that truth is naturally thought to play before we are confronted with the Liar paradox. (shrink)

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. (shrink)