Liar's Paradox Analysis

For this assignment, I chose to analyze one of the oldest and toughest paradoxes, the Liar Paradox. In my analysis of this paradox, I will first explain the background of the Liar’s Paradox, then analyze its meaning and the hypothesized solutions to it and from there explain which solution is the most plausible.
This semantic paradox has a long history that spans across several philosophers. The well-known version of this paradox was credited to the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, but different versions of the paradox are accredited to the Greek philosopher Eubulides of Miletus, Indian philosopher Bhartrhari, and Persian scientist Nasir al-Din al- Tusi. These versions span across vastly different time periods and geographical regions, proving …show more content…
This solution claims that in order to eliminate the paradox, we have to eliminate statements that refer to themselves, much like “this sentence is false”. So, this solution attacks the structure of the sentence, by putting limits on what is and is not accepted as the subject of the statement. This seems like a reasonable solution, but the only problem statements that apply to the Liars Paradox do not have to be self-referential. For example, take the classic statement that one side of a card is true, but then you turn the card over and the other side of the card says that the previous sentence was false. In this example, the two statements refer to each other, not themselves and still apply to the Liars Paradox. So, this solution, just like the one disallowing meaningless statements ends up being just as problematic as the original …show more content…
There are two different attempts at this solution. The first is to disallow the use of the words true and false to the original statements. This solution seems to strengthen the value of the truth value we assign to this statement but also puts limits on the original statement much like the first two solutions, which were found to be problematic and also eliminates statements predicating truth or falseness that are non-paradoxical.The second part of this solution comes from Alfred Tarski and states that there are different levels to the truth values, true and false. The original truth values in the statement do not have as much significance as the truth values we attach to the statement because the truth values in the sentences only apply to object language. Meanwhile, the truth values that we attach to the statements apply to a higher-level language, the meta- language. This solution is stronger than the other in the sense that they do not limit the content and sentence structure of the