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Doubting Thomas: From Bradwardine Back to Anon

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Unity, Truth and the Liar

Part of the book series: Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science ((LEUS,volume 8))

Stephen Read, following an idea of Thomas Bradwardine's, undertakes to repair the Tarski T-scheme. One happy result is that he is able to solve the Liar Paradox without departing from ordinary language. The upshot of Read's reasoning is that someone uttering a Liar sentence fails to speak the truth. But does this mean that that person utters a falsity, as Bradwardine claims, or that the speaker fails to utter a falsity as well as failing to utter a truth? An author writing more than a century before Bradwardine thinks the latter, holding that the Liar utterance does not express a proposition. Like Read, Bradwardine repudiates this view. But criticisms of his own theory keep leading us in the direction of that earlier theory. It is the earlier theory that is the right one.

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Goldstein, L. (2008). Doubting Thomas: From Bradwardine Back to Anon. In: Rahman, S., Tulenheimo, T., Genot, E. (eds) Unity, Truth and the Liar. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8468-3_4

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