The Liar, Context and Logical Form

Abstract

This essay attempts to give substance to the claim that the liar's paradox shows the truth predicate to be context sensitive. The aim is modest: to provide an account of the truth predicate's context sensitivity (1) that derives from a more general understanding of context sensitivity, (2) that does not depend upon a hierarchy of predicates and (3) that is able to address the liar's paradox. The consequences of achieving this goal are not modest, though. Perhaps surprisingly, for reasons that will be discussed in the last section of this essay, a natural account of the truth predicate's context sensitivity appears to lead naturally to a version of the correspondence theory of truth according to which the truth predicate can be understood as a relation holding between a sentence and a salient set of contexts. The plan of this essay is as follows. Section 1 contains a general account of context sensitivity. The purpose of this section is to isolate certain features of context sensitivity and formal methods of treating them, which we will then apply to the truth predicate. Section 2 then outlines two minimal conditions to be satisfied by a truth predicate. In Section 3, I present a version of the liar paradox that results from these conditions and the assumption that the truth predicate is not context sensitive in the sense described in section one. Finally, in section four, I provide what appear to be natural consequences of a truth predicate's context sensitivity. Section 4 is admittedly speculative and points in the direction for future research.