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Truth, the Liar, and Relativism |
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Συγγραφέας: Kevin Scharp Kevin Scharp: Truth, the Liar, and Relativism (pdf, 61 pages) I aim to establish a new connection between two topics. The first is the aletheic paradoxes (i.e., the paradoxes affecting truth, of which the liar is merely the most famous).1 Nearly as old as Western Philosophy itself, work on the liar paradox and others is still vibrant today. Contributions to this topic from analytic philosophy have come in roughly three waves. The first wave is based on Alfred Tarski’s work from the 1930s, which gave truth conditions for formulas of first order predicate calculus and set the stage for much of what came after. Saul Kripke’s seminal paper from 1975 posed serious problems for applying Tarski’s results to natural language and used new mathematical techniques to solve the paradoxes. Kripke’s work also inspired a whole generation of new approaches in the 1980s and early 1990s.2 After something of a lull, the twenty first century has seen a flurry of new activity—enough to constitute a third wave that is still building.3 The second topic is old as well—relativism. Probably around the time Eubulides allegedly formulated the liar paradox (c. fourth or fifth century B.C.E.), Protagoras gave a voice to the view that man is the measure of all things. Since them, formulations of relativism have become more precise, but have not fundamentally changed until this century, just a few years ago, when relativism was cast as a semantic theory. Or rather, as a family of presemantic, semantic, and postsemantic theories (these terms are explained below); contextualism, non-indexical contextualism, judge-dependence, and assessment-sensitivity are the most familiar. The debate over their merit has just begun, but has accelerated to a breakneck pace. Many of those involved approach the topic with their own idiosyncratic terms and classifications, which makes the literature difficult to follow. Such is a philosophical topic at its inception. There are few maps of this shifty terrain, but most agree that a... |
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