The Liar Speaks the Truth

Download or read book The Liar Speaks the Truth written by Aladdin M. Yaqub and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-08 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Yaqūb describes a simple conception of truth and shows that it yields a semantical theory that accommodates the whole range of our seemingly conflicting intuitions about truth. This conception takes the Tarskian biconditionals (such as "The sentence 'Johannes loved Clara' is true if and only if Johannes loved Clara") as correctly and completely defining the notion of truth. The semantical theory, which is called the revision theory, that emerges from this conception paints a metaphysical picture of truth as a property whose applicability is given by a revision process rather than by a fixed extension. The main advantage of this revision process is its ability to explain why truth seems in many cases almost redundant, in others substantial, and yet in others paradoxical (as in the famous Liar). Yaqūb offers a comprehensive defense of the revision theory of truth by developing consistent and adequate formal semantics for languages in which all sorts of problematic sentences (Liar and company) can be constructed. Yaqūb concludes by introducing a logic of truth that further demonstrates the adequacy of the revision theory.