The Liar: An Essay on Truth and Circularity - Hardcover

Barwise, Jon; Etchemendy, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019505072X ISBN 13: 9780195050721

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1987

Synopsis

Bringing together powerful new tools from set theory and the philosophy of language, this book proposes a solution to one of the few unresolved paradoxes from antiquity, the Paradox of the Liar. Treating truth as a property of propositions, not sentences, the authors model two distinct conceptions of propositions: one based on the standard notion used by Bertrand Russell, among others, and the other based on J.L. Austin's work on truth. Comparing these two accounts, the authors show that while the Russellian conception of the relation between sentences, propositions, and truth is crucially flawed in limiting cases, the Austinian perspective has fruitful applications to the analysis of semantic paradox. In the course of their study of a language admitting circular reference and containing its own truth predicate, Barwise and Etchemendy also develop a wide range of model-theoretic techniques--based on a new set-theoretic tool, Peter Aczel's theory of hypersets--that open up new avenues in logical and formal semantics.

About this title

About the Author

Jon Barwise is at Indiana University. John Etchemendy is at Stanford University.

Review

"A splendid book. [The authors] have striking new ideas and material. These they have thought through deftly and masterfully....This is a book to seize the philosophical imagination."--Mind

"We see from The Liar that the paradoxes are still a source of inspiration and logic. The book is a new, exciting contribution to the study of truth....It can be read not only as a contribution to the philosophy of language, but also as an interesting application of a theory of sets. It contains interesting theorems and in turn it will stimulate purely mathematical work."--Larry Moss, Bulletin of the American Math Society

"Exploiting Peter Aczel's theory of 'hypersets'...the authors propose an interesting new solution to the liar paradox....The Liar is a significant addition to the recent best literature on the paradox."--Choice

"The work grew out of research aimed at drawing up a mathematically rigorous account of language, so that computers can understand human speech....In their book the two logicians put forward a theory of language that includes explicitly some of the 'contextual parameters' so far left out of logic, but now shown to be crucial to understanding."--London Times

"This delightful book is a self-contained account of the Liar paradox, complete with a formal syntax and proof theory, semantics and proofs of the theorems. It should be of interest to more than just Liar specialists, however, because of the new semantic techniques it introduces."--The Canadian Philosophical Reviews

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019505072X
• ISBN 13: 9780195050721
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208