Jalāl ad-Dīn ad-Dawānī’s Solution to the Liar Paradox and Its Reception in Qāḍī Mubārak and Mullā Mubīn

Abstract

AbstractI examine the views of Jalāl ad-Dīn ad-Dawānī (d. 1502) on the Liar paradox and their reception in the work of Qāḍī Mubārak (d. 1748) and Mullā Mubīn (d. 1810). Dawānī argues that the Liar sentence is neither true nor false since it is not the kind of utterance that is capable of bearing a truth-value (i.e., it is not truth-apt). In the course of justifying this view, he proposes a criterion for a sentence’s being truth-apt and attempts to counter a number of objections. I address two of these: one involves certain intuitively true or false self-referential sentences and the other is the ‘strengthened Liar.’ I then argue that both Qāḍī Mubārak and Mullā Mubīn present a version of the solution Dawānī gives in his Sharḥ at-Tahdhīb and, moreover, that Dawānī does not endorse this solution in all his other works. Furthermore, the solution they attribute to Dawānī differs slightly from the one he gives in his Sharḥ at-Tahdhīb in terms of how the major premise is justified. I present evidence which shows that this modification was inspired by Mīr Zāhid al-Harawī’s (d. 1689) gloss on Dawānī’s Sharḥ at-Tahdhīb.