688 | charlie pelling
A self-referential paradox for the truth account of assertion CHARLIE PELLING
The truth account of assertion states that an assertion is proper if and only if it is true (Weiner 2005). Suppose I assert that ‘this assertion is improper’. If my assertion is true, then it is improper. If it is false, then it is proper. Either way, it constitutes a counterexample to the truth account of assertion. Birkbeck College, University of London 12-14 Gower Street London WC1E 6DP, UK
[email protected] Reference Weiner, M. 2005. Must we know what we say? The Philosophical Review 114: 227–51.
Analysis Vol 71 | Number 4 | October 2011 | pp. 688–688 doi:10.1093/analys/anr093 ! The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email:
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Paracompleteness and revenge BEN BURGIS
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.1 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’. Consider sentence (1): (1) Sentence (1) is either false or has the third truth-value.
1
See Field 2008 for an in-depth explication of this view.
Analysis Vol 71 | Number 4 | October 2011 | pp. 688–689 doi:10.1093/analys/anr088 ! The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email:
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dialetheists against pinocchio | 689
In the face of (1), a theorist who subscribes to the ‘third truth-value’ approach is in the intuitively awkward position of having to explain how (1) can have the third truth-value without therefore being true. In contrast, since the paracomplete theorist doesn’t accept the truth or the untruth of Liars, but instead rejects all such claims, he would seem to be free of these problems. Consider, however, sentence (2): (2) An ideally rational being who did not lack any relevant information would not accept sentence (2). If (2) is true, we have the starkly counter-intuitive result that an ideally rational being would fail to accept a sentence it knew to be true. If (2) is false, we have the equally counter-intuitive result that an ideally rational being would accept a sentence it knew to be false. If (2) is a sentence about which it would be rationally appropriate to apply the standard paracomplete solution and reject the relevant instance of the Law of the Excluded Middle, then a being who knew this, and who always did what was rationally appropriate, could hardly accept it. As such, if (2) is a sentence about which we should reject the relevant instance of the Law of the Excluded Middle, it is also true, and we once again have the extremely counter-intuitive result that an ideally rational being would fail to accept a sentence it knew to be true. The paracomplete approach may have many advantages over other consistent solutions to the paradoxes. Immunity to the revenge problems that typically plague such solutions, however, is not one of them. University of Ulsan South Korea
[email protected] Reference Field, H. 2008. Saving Truth from Paradox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dialetheists against Pinocchio JC BEALL
In his ‘Pinocchio against the dialetheists’ (2011), Peter Eldridge-Smith tells us the story of poor Pinocchio whose nose grows if and only if Pinocchio lies. One day, Pinocchio, in an effort to resist the powers of the dark side and rid
Analysis Vol 71 | Number 4 | October 2011 | pp. 689–691 doi:10.1093/analys/anr084 ! The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email:
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