The Liar in Context

About twenty-five years ago, Charles Parsons published a paper that began by asking why we still discuss the Liar Paradox. Today, the question seems all the more apt. In the ensuing years we have seen not only Parsons’ work (1974), but seminal work of Saul Kripke (1975), and a huge number of other important papers. Too many to list. Surely, one of them must have solved it! In a way, most of them have. Most papers on the Liar Paradox offer some explanation of the behavior of paradoxical sentences, and most also offer some extension for the predicate ‘true’ that they think is adequate, at least in some restricted setting. But if this is a solution, then the problem we face is far from a lack of solutions; rather, we have an overabundance of conflicting ones. Kripke’s work alone provides us with uncountably many different extensions for the truth predicate. Even if it so happens that one of these is a conclusive solution, we do not seem to know which one, or why. We should also ask, given that we are faced with many technically elegant but contradictory views, if they are really all addressing the same problem. What we lack is not solutions, but a way to compare and evaluate the many ones we have. This is a rather strange situation to be in. One would think that a solution to a philosophical puzzle would involve some explanation of what the puzzle is, and how the proposed solution is successful. This, it seems should be enough to evaluate and choose among proposed solutions. Though some work on the Liar Paradox has been like this, a great deal of it has not. The reason, I think, is that many paradoxes, and the Liar Paradox in particular, have a sort of dual nature. On the one hand, paradoxes can be merely logical puzzles. Solving a paradox, so understood, is a matter of finding some logical device that avoids whatever contradiction the paradox produces. On the other hand, paradoxes can be much more. Beyond posing some