The Liar Without Relativism

Some in the recent literature have claimed that a connection exists between the Liar paradox and semantic relativism : the view that the truth values of certain occurrences of sentences depend on the contexts at which they are assessed. Sagi (Erkenntnis 82(4):913–928, 2017) argues that contextualist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inErkenntnis Vol. 88; no. 1; pp. 267 - 288
Main Author Mankowitz, Poppy
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.01.2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Contextualism
Education
Epistemology
Ethics
Language
Linguistics
Logic
Natural language
Ontology
Original Research
Philosophy
Relativism
Semantics
Taste
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Summary:Some in the recent literature have claimed that a connection exists between the Liar paradox and semantic relativism : the view that the truth values of certain occurrences of sentences depend on the contexts at which they are assessed. Sagi (Erkenntnis 82(4):913–928, 2017) argues that contextualist accounts of the Liar paradox are committed to relativism, and Rudnicki and Łukowski (Synthese 1–20, 2019) propose a new account that they classify as relativist. I argue that a full understanding of how relativism is conceived within theories of natural language shows that neither of the purported connections can be maintained. There is no reason why a solution to the Liar paradox needs to accept relativism.
ISSN:0165-0106
1572-8420
DOI:10.1007/s10670-020-00350-0