Assertion and transparent self-knowledge

We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of one’s own doxastic states. It is, as we put it, transparent rather than empirical self-knowledge

Borg’s Minimalism and the Problem of Paradox

According to Emma Borg, minimalism is (roughly) the view that natural language sentences have truth conditions, and that these truth conditions are fully determined by syntactic structure and lexical content. A principal motivation for her brand of minimalism is that it coheres well with the popular view that semantic competence is underpinned by the cognition of a minimal semantic theory. In this paper, I argue that the liar paradox presents a serious problem for this principal motivation. Two lines of response to the problem are discussed, and difficulties facing those responses are raised. I close by issuing a challenge: to construe the principal motivation for Borg’s version of minimalism in such a way so as to avoid the problem of paradox

Non-cognitivism and the Problem of Moral-based Epistemic Reasons: A Sympathetic Reply to Cian Dorr

According to Cian Dorr, non-cognitivism has the implausible implication that arguments like the following are cases of wishful thinking: If lying is wrong, then the souls of liars will be punished in the afterlife; lying is wrong; therefore, the souls of liars will be punished in the afterlife. Dorr further claims that if non-cognitivism implies that the above argument and similar arguments are cases of wishful thinking, then non-cognitivism remains implausible even if one solves the so-called Frege-Geach problem. Dorr’s claims have faced a number of objections, but I believe that Dorr is on to something. So, after summarizing Dorr’s argument and briefly describing three flaws in what Dorr claims, I shall present a distinct objection to non-cognitivism and use the preceding to show what Dorr’s argument gets right and what it gets wrong

Testimonial worth

This paper introduces and argues for the hypothesis that judgments of testimonial worth are central to our practice of normatively appraising speech. It is argued that judgments of testimonial worth are central both to the judgement that an agent has lied, and to the acceptance of testimony. The hypothesis that, in lying, an agent necessarily displays poor testimonial worth, is shown to resolve a new puzzle about lying, and the recalcitrant problem raised by the existence of bald faced lies, and selfless assertions. It is then shown that the notion of testimonial worth allows us to capture the distinction between taking a speaker at their word, and treating them as a mere indicator of the truth in a way other theories fail to do

Gestalt Shifts in the Liar Or Why KT4M Is the Logic of Semantic Modalities

ABSTRACT: This chapter offers a revenge-free solution to the liar paradox (at the centre of which is the notion of Gestalt shift) and presents a formal representation of truth in, or for, a natural language like English, which proposes to show both why -- and how -- truth is coherent and how it appears to be incoherent, while preserving classical logic and most principles that some philosophers have taken to be central to the concept of truth and our use of that notion. The chapter argues that, by using a truth operator rather than truth predicate, it is possible to provide a coherent, model-theoretic representation of truth with various desirable features. After investigating what features of liar sentences are responsible for their paradoxicality, the chapter identifies the logic as the normal modal logic KT4M (= S4M). Drawing on the structure of KT4M (=S4M), the author proposes that, pace deflationism, truth has content, that the content of truth is bivalence, and that the notions of both truth and bivalence are semideterminable

Some Varieties of Superparadox. The implications of dynamic contradiction, the characteristic form of breakdown of breakdown of sense to which self-reference is prone

The Problem of the Paradoxes came to the fore in philosophy and mathematics with the discovery of Russell's Paradox in 1901. It is the "forgotten" intellectual-scientific problem of the Twentieth Century, because for more than sixty years a pretence was maintained, by a consensus of logicians, that the problem had been "solved"

Montague's Paradox without Necessitation

Some such as Dean (2014) suggest that Montague's paradox requires the necessitation rule, and that the use of the rule in such a context is contentious. But here, I show that the paradox arises independently of the necessitation rule. A derivation of the paradox is given in modal system T without deploying necessitation; a necessitation-free derivation is also formulated in a significantly weaker system