The Puzzle of the Liar Paradox

Let's start with three basic assumptions:(1) Meaningful sentences of English have "truth conditions" – a set of conditions or circumstances under which sentences are true. For example, the sentence labeled 'A',A: 'Florida is north of the equator.'is true because its truth condition is met: Florida

north of the equator. On the other hand, there are sentences we can understand, but which are false. For example sentencelabeled 'B',B: 'Abraham Lincoln was the president of the US in 2005.'is meaningful, but false, because the sentence's truth conditions are not met: sinceAbraham Lincoln died in 1865, he couldn’t have been the president in 2005.(2) Every meaningful sentence of the English language is true if, and only if, it's truthconditions are met, and false if, and only if, its truth conditions are not met.(3) Every meaningful sentence is either true or false. A sentence labeled by 'S' is false if,and only if, the sentence, 'It is not the case that S.' is true.These seemingly innocent assumptions get us into trouble because they lead us to an

inconsistent

set of beliefs. A set of beliefs is inconsistent if two beliefs contradict eachother. We’ll explain exactly what this means in a moment, but first we need someterminology. Let

and

stand for propositions – roughly that which is expressed by asentence – and

not-P

and

not-Q

stand for the negations of those propositions. If we let

stand for the proposition expressed by the sentence, ‘Christopher Columbus discoveredAmerica’, then

not-P

stands for the proposition expressed by the sentence, ‘It is not thecase that Christopher Columbus discovered America.’So to return to our discussion of belief and consistency, we say that a set of beliefs isinconsistent if it contains both

and

not-P

. For example, if I believe both that a bodymust have a soul to have a mind AND that a soulless robot can have a mind, then I havean inconsistent set of beliefs. It’s the aim of Western philosophy to examine one's beliefs,check for inconsistencies and if any are found to try and remove them – by revising beliefs or perhaps by removing some.So how do assumptions (1)-(3) lead to inconsistency? Consider sentence labeled '

: 'Sentence

is false.'