The Liar An Essay on Truth and Circularity [Paperback]

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.

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 fromThe Liarthat 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 Liaris a significant addition to the recent best literature on the paradox. --Choice

The work grew out of research aimed at drawing up a mathemlóí