Unsolved Problems in Philosophy Part 1: The Liar's Paradox

Kevin

Graham Priest discusses The Liar's Paradox for a NY Times blog. It seems that one way of solving the Liar's Paradox is defining dialethei, a true contradiction. Less Wrong, can you do what modern philosophers have failed to do and solve or successfully dissolve the Liar's Paradox? This doesn't seem nearly as hard as solving free will.

This post is a practice problem for what may become a sequence on unsolved problems in philosophy.

Tarski left out some of the fine print. That "if and only if" works only under the prior assumption that "snow" designates snow, "white" designates white

Not really. If "snow" designates grass, and "white" designates green, then "'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" is still correct. Same if "snow" designates the sky and "white" designates green.

I'm afraid I don't understand your point.

0FAWS16y

If you can't take as a given that statements actually are in the language they appear to be in no statement can have any knowable truth value. If "snow" in the utterance is a word in the same language as the identically spelled word in the statement, and the same for "white" (and "is"), and the rest of the statement means exactly the same as it does in English then the statement is still correct. But if "white" might designate orange "true" might just as well designate bubblegum or "only" designate "to treat like a second cousin".

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Unsolved Problems in Philosophy Part 1: The Liar's Paradox

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Unsolved Problems in Philosophy Part 1: The Liar's Paradox

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