This is Greg Restall’s website, with news, writings, pictures, and links. For background see below.

Models for Liars in Bradwardine’s Theory of Truth

“Models for Liars in Bradwardine’s Theory of Truth,” pages 135-147 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.

Details

Author: Greg Restall
Status: Published in 2008

Local file: bradwardine-liars.pdf (240KB)

Subjects: Bradwardine modal logic models paradox relevant logic

About

I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.

Start at the home page—a summary of the site. The left column is news, archived on the news archive page. The central column is for photos, archived on the occasional photos page. The right column contains recent items from the writing page, which lists my publications. These are also categorised by topic. You can follow my links at my account on delicious and occasional short snarky remarks at @consequently on twitter.

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Thought

I have no reason for believing the existence of matter. I have no immediate intuition thereof: neither can I immediately, from any sensations, ideas, notions, actions or passions infer an unthinking, unperceiving, inactive substance–either by probable deduction or necessary consequence.
— George Berkeley Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.