Abstract:

The point of departure for my dissertation is the defeatist thought that every conventional attempt to resolve the natural language liar paradox gives rise to a strengthened version of the paradox, couched in the vocabulary of the putative solution. The project of the dissertation is to explore the prospects for an unconventional response to the liar paradox, namely, the Tarskian suggestion that natural language is "inconsistent" because it contains its own truth predicate. After arguing that this suggestion can be made both coherent and compelling, I consider the consequences of accepting it. In light of the intellectual pressures to revise or abandon our defective alethic discourse, on the one hand, and the daunting technical and practical obstacles facing such an undertaking, on the other, I recommend that we retain the discourse as a convenient fiction, or fa?on de parler. This proposal is then defended from objections of incoherence, through the development of an independently plausible account of fictional content that does not involve the notion of truth. Finally, the attendant account of content for inconsistent fictions is applied to our na?ve theory of truth, generating a reinterpretation of Kripke's influential fixed point construction that is immune to any strengthened version of the liar paradox.