“Models for Liars in Bradwardine’s Theory of Truth,” to appear in Unity, Truth and the Liar: The Modern Relevance of Medieval Solutions to the Liar Paradox edited by Shahid Rahman, Tero Tulenheimo and Emmanuel Genot, Springer, 2008
Stephen Read’s work on Bradwardine’s theory of truth is some of the most exciting work on truth and insolubilia in recent years. In this paper, I give models for Read’s formulation of Bradwardine’s theory of truth, and I examine the behaviour of liar sentences in those models. I conclude by examining Bradwardine’s argument to the effect that if something signifies itself to be untrue then it signifies itself to be true as well. We will see that there are models in which this conclusion fails. This should help us elucidate the hidden assumptions required to underpin Bradwardine’s argument, and to make explicit the content of Bradwardine’s theory of truth.