Game of Truth: Truth, Fictionalism, and Semantic Paradox

Abstract

According to dialetheists, there are true contradictions. Anti-dialetheists deny this. David Lewis famously thought that the dialetheist’s toleration of contradiction was beyond the pale and made dialogue between the two sides impossible. But this sceptical view presents him with at least two problems. First, what do we do about the apparent appearance of contradiction when we reason about certain topics such as truth? Secondly, contrary to any summary dismissal of contradiction, don’t we often at least contemplate and imagine things that are impossible? Lewis responded that we sometimes make believe that impossibilities are possible, “subtle ones at least”, but that these cases seem to require a distinction between the subtle ones and the blatant ones, a distinction that he for one didn’t know how to draw. In this paper, I argue that there is a reading of Lewis’s remarks on which they not only suggest an attractive account of the imaginability of the impossible, but also a potentially compelling solution to the kind of paradoxes that drive dialetheism, as well as an equally natural caution about how far such a solution can be taken.