Abstract
We may suppose that the truth predicate that we utilize in our semantic metalanguage is a two-place predicate relating sentences to contexts, the truth-in-context-X predicate. Seeming paradoxes pertaining to the truth-in-context-X predicate can be blocked by placing restrictions on the structure of contexts. While contexts must specify a domain of contexts, and what a context constant denotes relative to a context must be a context in the context domain of that context, no context may belong to its own context domain. A generalization of that restriction appears to block all of the paradoxes of truth-in-context-X. This restriction entails that, in a certain sense, we cannot talk about the context we are in. This result will be defended, up to a point, on broadly ontological grounds. It will also be conjectured that our semantic metalanguage can be regarded as semantically closed.
Highlights
We may suppose that the truth predicate that we utilize in our semantic metalanguage is a two-place predicate relating sentences to contexts, the truth-incontext-X predicate
When we are writing a semantic theory for natural languages, we need to acknowledge that sentences are neither true nor false simpliciter but only true or false relative to a context
Gauker determined location in time and space. These examples suggest that the truth predicate we need for our semantic metalanguage is the relational predicate ‘‘is true in’’, which may be written between an expression denoting a sentence and an expression denoting a context
Summary
When we are writing a semantic theory for natural languages, we need to acknowledge that sentences are neither true nor false simpliciter but only true or false relative to a context. Gauker determined location in time and space These examples suggest that the truth predicate we need for our semantic metalanguage is the relational predicate ‘‘is true in’’, which may be written between an expression denoting a sentence and an expression denoting a context. (I will not try to say what might lie beyond the swath that can be handled in this way.) This will involve placing a considerably more general constraint on the structure of contexts than the restriction against reflexive reference to contexts. The name is already taken and refers to those approaches that propose to undercut the reasoning that leads to a contradiction by positing a shift in context that renders the apparent contradiction not really a contradiction Examples of this approach include Barwise and Etchemendy (1987), Simmons (1993, 2018), Glanzberg (2001, 2004) and Murzi and Rossi (2018). The attempt to derive a contradiction transgresses the restriction on the structure of contexts
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