Unity, Truth and the Liar
The Modern Relevance of Medieval Solutions to the Liar Paradox
Editors: Rahman, Shahid, Tulenheimo, Tero, Genot, Emmanuel (Eds.)
Free Preview- Provides a formal reconstruction of several medieval theories of truth, demonstrating their relevance to modern research
- Approaches the discussion about truth theory and paradoxes from a semantical, logical and a historical perspective
- Contains critical editions of the medieval sources of the insolubilia, such as Heytesbury’s treatise on Insolubles (14th century), with introduction and notes
- Revives the debate on the Liar Paradox
- Entirely written in dispute style
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- About this book
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The Liar Paradox challenges logicians’ and semanticists’ theories of truth and meaning. Modern accounts of paradoxes in formal semantics offer solutions through the hierarchy of object language and metalanguage. Yet this solution to the Liar presupposes that sentences have unique meaning. This assumption is non-controversial in formal languages, but an account of how “hidden meaning” is made explicit is necessary to any complete analysis of natural language. Since the Liar Paradox presents itself as a sentence uniting contradictory meanings, appreciating how they can be united in a single sentence may provide new insights into this and other paradoxes.
This volume includes a target paper, taking up the challenge to revive, within a modern (formal) framework, a medieval solution to the Liar Paradox which did not assume Uniqueness of Meaning. Stephen Read, author of the target paper, attempts to formally state a theory of truth that dates back to the 14th century logician Thomas Bradwardine; the theory offers a solution to the Liar Paradox in which the Liar sentence turns out to be false. The rest of the volume consists of papers discussing and/or challenging Read’s – and Bradwardine’s -- views one the one hand, and papers addressing the doctrinal and historical background of medieval theories of truth on the other hand. It also includes a critical edition of Heytesbury’s treatise on insolubles, closely related to Bradwardine’s view.
Including formal, philosophical and historical discussions, this volume intends to renew the debate about paradoxes and theory of truth, and to show that the interest of earlier medieval work is not merely historical but, on the contrary, still relevant for modern, formal semantic theory. It is of interest for both professional philosophers and advanced students of philosophy.
- Table of contents (15 chapters)
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The Truth Schema and the Liar
Pages 3-17
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Read and Indirect Revenge
Pages 19-40
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Tarski's Hidden Theory of Meaning: Sentences Say Exactly One Thing
Pages 41-63
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Doubting Thomas: From Bradwardine Back to Anon
Pages 65-85
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Logic Without Truth
Pages 87-112
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
-
- Book Title
- Unity, Truth and the Liar
- Book Subtitle
- The Modern Relevance of Medieval Solutions to the Liar Paradox
- Editors
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- Shahid Rahman
- Tero Tulenheimo
- Emmanuel Genot
- Series Title
- Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science
- Series Volume
- 8
- Copyright
- 2008
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Copyright Holder
- Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
- eBook ISBN
- 978-1-4020-8468-3
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-1-4020-8468-3
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-1-4020-8467-6
- Softcover ISBN
- 978-90-481-7888-9
- Series ISSN
- 2214-9775
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XXIV, 338
- Topics
