As I indicated yesterday, there is a new book out titled "Reflections on the Liar," an anthology edited by Bradley Armour-Garb, published by Oxford University Press.
One of the essays in this collection is by Gila Sher, who teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.
Sher's essay in this book, "Truth and Transcendence," takes the view that there must be different levels at which truth operates, which she calls the immanent and the transcendent level.
For truth to serve as a standard for thought at all, three things must happen: there must be genuine immanent thought about the world; there must be transcendent thought ABOUT the immanent thought, and thirdly; there must be a normative evaluation within the transcendent thought as to whether the world matches what the immanent thought says about it.
As I said yesterday, here are two broad approaches to undermining the paradoxical character of the statement that purports to lie about itself. We can try denying that it is a well-formed statement, or we can deny the premise that every well-formed statement must be either true or false.
Sher takes the first of those approaches. For a proposition (p) to be well formed for her means for the statement "p is true" to transcend the truth predicate within p; that is, for p to be a genuine immanent thought about the world. The particular p at issue "this sentence is false" fails that test. Thus paradox does not arise.
That account seems right to me.
Let's consider the second approach: denying that every well-formed statement must be either true or false. This depends upon how we define "true or false." What about statement of aesthetic or moral opinion, such as "This movie is good" or "This action is moral"? They are not true or false in the sense that a scientific statement is, but they are objective to the extent that they can be supported with reasons and debated. They are not merely matters of taste. Someone might say, for example, "I like Stephen King's books more than Shakespeare's plays, but I recognize that Shakespeare's plays are greater literature.
ReplyDeleteBut what about something that is a matter of taste, which cannot be debated, such as "Chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla"? That cannot be true or false as it is stated. But it can be restated as "I like chocolate ice cream better than I like vanilla," and that is either true or false.
Personally, I believe that statements like "This action is moral" are objective in roughly the same sense as "this organism is alive." The construct of "life" is a complicated one, involving the self-replication of certain complicated organic molecules and the structures in which they house themselves. But if we agree on the concept, then we can objectively assert that a given organism meets the requirements of that concept, that it is alive. Likewise (I think) the value of the appreciation of works of art. A work of art is already a complicated idea -- the act of "appreciating" it, more so But if we can agree on all of that, we can agree that it is good, valuable, that we can do so.
ReplyDeleteI accept your analysis of statements about vanilla.
But assuming we conclude that even well formed sentences have more than two possible truth values --that they sometimes have a neither-true-nor-false valuation -- I don't think that's the best way to deal with the logic of the liar paradox.