Abstract
Context-sensitive approaches to the liar paradox have been given by a number of authors, including Burge, Parsons, and Gaifman. One of Burge's students, Robert Koons, has developed the context-sensitive approach in greatest detail in his (1992), a tour de force of technical sophistication and philosophical subtlety. Koons shows that Barwise and Etchemendy's 'situation-theoretic' approach is a variety of context-sensitive theory. For definiteness I will focus on the Burge-Koons version, although analogous constructions can be given for all of the theories mentioned. The context-sensitive approach assigns 'levels' to occurrences of 'true' in particular sentence tokens or types. The predicate 'true' is taken to be indexical, so that its extension varies from context to context. A context is determined by a variety of features of the world, including what sentencetokens have been uttered. The semantic paradoxes are dealt with by assigning paradoxical sentences different truth values at different levels of a
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