The Apparent Paradox

Paradox
Bert Cappelle
Some simple questions
Is artificial grass a kind of grass?
Are false teeth still teeth nonetheless?
Is an apparent paradox also a paradox?
Easy answer
Yes and no.
Take artificial grass.
• Yes: it’s grass, not shrubbery, trees, flowers, etc.
• No: artificial is not real, and only real grass is grass.
The problem
Are we dealing with a paradox here?
Or only with an apparent paradox?
(In which case it may still be a paradox…)
The Apparent Paradox
paradox
More on its premises and the conclusion based on them
Premise 1
Apparent being an adjective, it modifies the noun,
whose reference thereby becomes more specific.
• A red ball is, first and foremost, a ball (but not just any
ball)
• By analogy, an apparent paradox, is first and foremost, a
paradox (but not just any paradox)
Premise 2
In apparent paradox, apparent is used in the sense of
“Appearing to the senses or mind, as distinct from
(though not necessarily opposed to) what really is;
seeming. Contrasted with real. (The commonest
sense now ...)” (OED)
apparent has other senses, among which “Manifest to the
understanding; evident, plain, clear, obvious; palpable”
(OED),
• as in “It was apparent to all that he was a very gifted
athlete” (www)
• that’s clearly not the sense used in apparent paradox
"apparent, adj. and n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2015.
Web. 8 October 2015.
Premise 2, strengthened
In apparent paradox, we use apparent in the sense
of “distinct from and opposed to what really is”.
“And the paradox is only apparent: there is no paradox in
reality.” (www)
“‘Your friends have more friends than you’ The title is a
statement of ‘The Friendship Paradox’ (which is, of course,
not a paradox but only an apparent paradox).” (www)

Frequent use of only with apparent supports this

strengthened version.
Cp. I had a bad dream ⇏ It’s opposed to what really is
It was only a dream ⇒ It’s opposed to what really is
The paradoxical conclusion
the statement “An apparent paradox is a paradox” is
both true and not true.
or
the answer to the question “Is an apparent paradox
a paradox?” is both “yes” and “no”.
or
an apparent paradox both is and is not a paradox,
thus violating the law of non-contradiction
Is there a problem?
• Contradictions are not allowed in classical logics
• Law of non-contradiction: nothing can be both A and ¬A
• Principle of explosion: ex contradictione (sequitur)
quodlibet (anything can be shown to follow from a
contradiction)
• Contradictions are ‘fine’ in paraconsistent logics
• My informal proposal may be compatible with these
Two possible solutions
A. Reject premise 1: not all adjectives are ‘subsective’
e.g., a dangerous criminal is obviously a criminal, but an
alleged criminal isn’t necessarily a criminal
B. Reject (the conclusion of) the conclusion: the law of
non-contradiction is not really violated
• An apparent paradox can be a paradox in one sense but
not a paradox in another sense
• The law of non-contradiction only forbids that we say
contradictory things of something at the same time and
in the same sense
Let’s take a simpler example
Apparent paradox fake gun
Solution A to the
Apparent Paradox
Paradox
Not all adjectives are ‘subsective’; some are ‘privative’;
therefore, the premise that a fake gun must be a gun is false
Several kinds of adjectives
• subsective
• intersective
• plain non-subsective
• privative non-subsective
(Kamp 1975, Kamp and Partee 1995, Partee 1995)

Kamp, Hans. 1975. Two theories about adjectives. In: Edward L. Keenan (eds.),
Formal Semantics of Natural Language, 123-155. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kamp, Hans, and Barbara Partee. 1995. Prototype theory and compositionality.
Cognition 57: 129- 191.
Partee, Barbara. 1995. Lexical Semantics and Compositionality. In: Lila Gleitman and
Mark Liberman (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science (Second Edition). Volume
1: Language, 311– 360. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Subsective adjectives
e.g. good, skillful
x is a good gun ⇒ x is a gun
Guns

Good guns
Intersective adjectives
e.g. red, carnivorous
x is a red ball ⇒ x is red and x is a ball

Red things Balls

Red balls
All intersectives are subsective
• All intersective adjectives are subsective
x is a red ball ⇒ x is a ball (valid inference)
• Not all subsective adjectives are intersective
x is a good gun ⇏ x is good and x is a gun (invalid
inference)
e.g. a good gun is not necessarily a good present for your
five-year-old son; it’s just good as a gun (Siegel 1976a, b)

Siegel, Muffy. 1976a. Capturing the Russian adjective. In Barbara H. Partee (ed.),
Montague Grammar, 293-309. New York: Academic Press.
Siegel, Muffy E. A. 1976b. Capturing the Adjective. Ph.D. dissertation. University of
Massachusetts.
Plain non-subsective adjectives
e.g. alleged, possible
x is an alleged criminal ⇏ x is a criminal
Criminals

Alleged
criminals ?

?
Privative non-subsective adjectives
e.g. fake, imaginary
x is a fake gun ⇏ x is a gun
⇒ x is not a gun Guns

Fake guns
Some privative adjectives
artificial feigned non-existent
bogus fictitious past
counterfeit forged phoney
ersatz fraudulent pretend
fabricated imaginary spurious
fake make-believe unreal
false mock would-be
faux mythical …
More on privatives
• Also called “alienans adjectives” by medieval
philosophers (Murray and Kujundzic 2005: 89)
• Privative nouns
imitation as in imitation leather
toy as in toy gun
• Privative prefixes
ex-
non-
pseudo-

Murray, Malcolm and Nebojsa Kujundzic. 2005. Critical Reflection: A Textbook for
Critical Thinking. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Fake gun
“any adequate treatment of privative Adjs such as
fake has to explain why, for instance, from knowing
that x is a fake gun we can infer
i. that x is not a gun, and
ii. that x was created with the intention that it only
seem like a gun, but not that it can be used to shoot.”
(Del Pinal 2015: 8)

Del Pinal, Guillermo. 2015. Dual Content Semantics, privative adjectives, and
dynamic compositionality. Semantics & Pragmatics 8, article 7, 1-53.
Del Pinal’s (2015) proposal
fake operates on a noun’s
i. “E-structure”: its extension, i.e. all the entities that
the noun applies to
ii. “C-structure”: “core facts” about the noun’s
stereotype (in the sense of Putnam 1970)

Putnam, Hillary. 1970. Is semantics possible? Metaphilosophy 1(3). 187–201.

Qualia roles
C-structure is organized in terms of “qualia roles”
(Pustejovski 1995), i.e. broad semantic dimensions:
• CONSTITUTIVE: the relation between the entity and its parts,
what it is part of, or what it is made of.
• FORMAL: that which we use to distinguish or pick out the
entity (e.g., shape, orientation, taste, magnitude, and color).
• TELIC: the purpose or function of the entity.
• AGENTIVE: factors connected with the origin or way in which
the entity came into being.

Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
A bit of technical detail
“we can take [fake] as an operator which takes the meaning of
the noun it modifies and restructures it by using—via Qualia
functions—the noun’s C-structure. …
DC is a variable that ranges over ordered sets of the E-
structure.
So … fake takes the entire meaning, as an ordered set of the
E-structure and all the elements of the C-structure, and
outputs a new predicate … that is not a QE(DC), was not
created with the same goal specified in QT(DC), but was
created to have the perceptual features specified in QF(DC).”
(Del Pinal 2015: 14)
Fake (gun)
So, when fake applies to gun, it gives a description
that is “satisfied by objects that are not guns, were
not made with the goal of being shooting
instruments, and were made to have the perceptual
features specified in [the FORMAL qualia function]
(i.e., to look like guns).” (Del Pinal 2015: 15)
Similar proposal by Oliver (2013)
“fake contributes two constraints on interpretation:
(a) The intended referent does not have the function
(telic quale) specified by the noun and (b) The
intended referent does not have the source/origin
(agentive quale) specified by the noun.”

Oliver, Michael A. 2013. Interpretation as optimization: (So-called) privative

Adjective Constructions. Abstract for a paper presented at the Third Mid-
Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning (MACSIM). 13 April 2013. Johns
Hopkins University, Cognitive Science Department.
Del Pinal (2015) vs. Oliver (2013)
These scholars relate differently to Partee (2010),
who says that there are, in fact, no privatives.
• Oliver (2013) basically accepts this proposal, but
adds constraints to it
• Del Pinal (2015) rejects it
So, let’s turn to Partee’s (2010), which offers an
alternative solution to the Apparent Pardox paradox
But first…

Partee, Barbara. 2010. Privative adjectives: subsective plus coercion. Rainer

Bäuerle, Uwe Reyle and Thomas Ede Zimmermann (eds.), Presuppositions and
Discourse: Essays Offered to Hans Kamp, 273-285. Leiden: Brill.
Interim summary
• The Apparent Paradox paradox: there seem to be
objects, like false teeth, that are and aren’t a
certain thing
• Solution A: the premise “an Adj N is always a N” is
false, as some adjectives (‘privative’ ones) negate
that an object falls within the extension of that N
Solution B to the
Apparent Paradox
Paradox
We don’t violate the law of non-contradiction if we accept
that a fake gun can be a gun in one sense and not a gun in
another sense
Versatility of words
So, is a fake gun a gun or is it not a gun?
This is hard to answer, since words can be made
to ‘mean’ different things in different contexts.
This is a process known as ‘coercion’.
Examples of coercion
• [One waitress to another:] The ham sandwich in the corner
wants some coffee. (ham sandwich = ‘the person who
ordered/who is eating a ham sandwich’)
• Plato is up there on the shelf, next to Chomsky. (Plato =
‘book by Plato/bust of Plato’)
• I’m parked out back. I got hit in the fender. (I = ‘my car’)
(Jackendoff 2013: 83)

Jackendoff, Ray. 2013. Constructions in the parallel architecture. In Thomas

Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Construction
Grammar. New York: OUP, 70-92.
Partee (2010)
“The hypothesis I propose is that … adjectives fake and
imaginary aren’t actually privative, but subsective, and that no
adjectives are actually privative. In interpreting a question like
[1] or a sentence like [2], I hypothesize that we actually expand
the denotation of ‘fur’ to include both fake and real fur.
[1] Is that gun real or fake?
[2]a. I don’t care whether that fur is fake fur or real fur.
b. I don’t care whether that fur is fake or real.”
(Partee 2010: 279)
Gun1 and gun2
“A fake gun is not a gun.”

gun1 = real gun

normal interpretation
gun2 = gun or fake gun
coerced interpretation
Nouns coerce very easily
“I have a photograph of my grandparents in the grounds of
Milton Hall taken in 1913. … My aunt remembers that there
was a large gate with two lions on the pillars … .” (www)

• You probably didn’t even think of the flesh-and-blood

animals
• Coercion can take place without the presence of a
modifier such as stone or fake
One more authentic example
“The two employees realized the gun was fake when the man
accidentally dropped the gun and it split into two pieces, said
Avinash Maskey, 24, who works the morning shift at the gas
station ...” (www)

• We can refer to something as a gun2 even though we know

it’s not a real gun1.
• Too cumbersome to say, “thing looking like a gun”? Perhaps.
• Just saying gun is also a matter of adopting someone else’s
viewpoint (cf. infra)
Del Pinal doesn’t fully buy it
He accepts that there is coercion
• in the case of constitutive material NPs
stone lions, rubber ducks, …
• in a sentence like
Is that gun real or fake?

He does not accept that there is coercion

• when fake premodifies the N
a fake gun
Stone lion vs. fake gun
According to Del Pinal (2015):
• a stone lion could still be a lion1
• a fake gun can never be a gun1
stone lions1 and rubber rabbits1
“Something unbelievable happened at MIT. Scientists
discovered a way of making, literally, stone lions and rubber
rabbits.” (Del Pinal 2015: 30)
Failure to get fake gun1
“Something amazing happened at MIT. Some engineer
managed to make, literally, a fake gun.” (Del Pinal 2015: 32)
“Listen to this unbelievable story. Some immoral toy store
owner was, literally, selling fake guns at his store.” (Del Pinal
2015: 32)

According to Del Pinal (2015) we can never get fake gun to

refer to a real gun, which should be possible in contexts which
instruct us not to apply coercion.

But this is wrong, as I’ll show.

Okay, often a fake N is never N1
fake beard fake moustache
fake blood fake orgasm
fake flowers fake snow
fake fur fake tan
fake money fake wood
But a fake N can be a real N1
• A fake website is, actually, a website1. [debatable]
“A fake website is a website that will try and get your
personal information so they can spam you with emails, calls,
and many more things.” (www)
• A fake address may, actually, be an existing address1.
“Just because you get an address off them does not mean
that it will not be fake also. I’ve had that problem before
where I’ve purchased goods and been sent to a fake address
(turned out to be a flower shop in Portugal, nice scenery
though).” (www)
• fake documents, fake letter, fake papers, fake telephone call
• fake goods, fake products, fake stuff, fake things
• fake article, fake story, fake video (thanks to Cédric Patin)
• fake people (used in the most common way)
• fake gesture
How about fake name?
Is a fake name, actually, a real name1?
“A fake name is a name that is not yours legally.” (www)
Depends on your definition of name
• Label to identify someone? (“I know a name is just a sound
somebody makes when they need you” – Silicon Valley)
then it’s not a name1.
• Member of an established list of boys’ names or girls’ names?
then it is a name1.
• Made-up phonetic sequence that only sounds like a name (e.g.
Georgard or Snitsakov)?
then it’s not a name1.
Strict compositionality untenable
• We can’t seem to predict the meaning of fake N:
• Sometimes a fake N is clearly privative in meaning, sometimes it
clearly isn’t (fake flower vs. fake person)
• Which features of the N meaning will be negated?
• Which features of the N meaning will be retained?
• What is ‘core’ and what is ‘diagnostic’, anyway?
• Different situations profile different features as ‘core’
• Maybe fake is polysemous
• e.g. ‘lacking full functionality’, ‘having a false origin’, …
• but in that case, we can’t predict which meaning of fake will be
selected
We need another account
A ‘new’ solution to the
Apparent Paradox
Paradox
A fake gun is a gun from one perspective and not a gun from
another perspective (whereby a gun may be ‘a particular gun’)
Main features of the solution
• Similar to solution B (i.e. no real contradiction)
• Based on perspectival relativity of categorization
judgements, a proposal by Franks (1995)
• I take ‘perspectives’ in the sense of points of view or ‘voices’
à la Ducrot (1984)
• My proposal is largely similar to Coulson & Fauconnier’s
(1999), involving mental spaces and conceptual blending

Coulson, Seana and Gilles Fauconnier. 1999. Fake Guns and Stone Lions:
Conceptual Blending and Privative Adjectives. In Barbara Fox, Dan Jurafsky &
Laura Michaelis (Eds.) Cognition and Function in Language, 143-158. Palo Alto,
CA: CSLI.
Ducrot, Oswald. 1984. Le dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit.
Franks, Bradley. 1995. Sense generation: A quasi-classical approach to concepts
and concept combination. Cognitive Science 19(4), 441–505.
Variation in perspectives
When classifying an object, we take a certain
perspective:
“The most extreme context dependence is a case where an
entity is classified as an x from one perspective, but as not-x
from another. That is, variation in perspectives can give rise to
apparent self-contradictions in classification. They are,
however, only apparent self-contradictions because the
classifications intentionally use different kinds of information.
Only if contradictory classifications were to be made using the
same information, would they be truly self-contradictory.”
(Franks 1995: 450)
Central vs. diagnostic attributes
“So, it is coherent to classify a statue of a lion as a nonlion, or
a fake gun as a non-gun, from one perspective (relating to
presumed essence, or central attributes), but as a lion and a
gun from another perspective (relating to diagnostic,
appearance attributes).” (Franks 1995: 450)
Perspectives viewed differently
Perspectives: your own beliefs vs. someone else’s
“the sense generation model [of Franks (1995)] … does not
incorporate a crucial component of being fake: the faker’s
intention to create a discrepancy between his own beliefs
about the fake object and those of his victim or victims.
Moreover, a successful fake implies that the audience reacts
to a fake gun in the same way they might react to a real gun.”
(Coulson & Fauconnier 1999)
Mental spaces in fake gun blend

robbery scenario (Coulson & Fauconnier 1999)

Beyond attributes
“We suggest that the real/fake distinction lies beyond the
attributes of the gun itself. Rather, the character of a fake gun
will depend on the faker’s motivation, the scenario in which
the gun is to function, and the knowledge of the prospective
victim.” (Coulson & Fauconnier 1999; emphasis added)
cf. Frame Semantics (Boas 2005, Fillmore 1976, Petruck 1996)

Boas, Hans C. 2005. From theory to practice: Frame Semantics and the design of
FrameNet. In Stefan Langer & Daniel Schnorbusch (eds.), Semantik im Lexikon,
129-160. Tübingen: Narr.
Fillmore, Charles C. 1976. Frame semantics and the nature of language. In Stevan
R. Harnad, Horst D. Steklis & Jane Lancaster (eds.), Annals of the NY Academy
of Sciences, Vol. 280: Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech, 20-32.
Petruck, Miriam R. L. 1996. Frame Semantics. In Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Ostman,
Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics, 1-13.
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Frame semantics
“a word’s meaning can be understood only with reference to a
structured background of experience, beliefs, or practices”
(Fillmore and Atkins 1992: 76-77)
e.g. commercial transaction frame
frame elements: BUYER, SELLER, GOODS, MONEY
frame events: transfer of MONEY from BUYER to SELLER;
followed by transfer of GOODS from SELLER to BUYER

Fillmore, Charles J. and Atkins, Beryl T. 1992. Towards a Frame-based Organization

of the Lexicon: The Semantics of RISK and its Neighbors. In Adrienne Lehrer
and Eva Kittay (eds.), Frames, Fields and Contrast: New Essays in Semantics
and Lexical Organization, 75-102. Hillsdale (NJ): Erlbaum.
The framing frame
AGENT PATIENT INSTRUMENT …

PERPETRATOR VICTIM INCRIMINATING ELEMENT …

“He claimed another criminal who ran a cannabis farm with

Taylor was behind the killing, but that detectives manipulated
evidence to frame him.” (Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary)
“Crews … protests his innocence saying Gregson framed him with
a mug that had his fingerprints on it.” (www)
Encyclopaedic knowledge
PERPETRATOR:
‘crooked cop’ or mafia-type villain
MEANS:
• ‘planting’ a weapon, drugs or a dead body (the INCRIMINATING ELEMENT) as
false evidence in a location associated with the VICTIM (their car, house,
etc.); the VICTIM has nothing to do with this INCRIMINATING ELEMENT;
• alternatively, ‘planting’ an object (the INCRIMINATING ELEMENT) which is
clearly related to the VICTIM, such as a piece of the VICTIM’s clothing or
an object with the VICTIM’s fingerprints on it, as false evidence in the
location of a crime which the VICTIM has nothing to do with
• …
GOAL:
PERPETRATOR wants to cause the VICTIM (usually an adversary) to come
under criminal suspicion by (straight) police inspectors and/or even more
dangerous villains (in the hope that they then go after the VICTIM)
…
Fake gun as a gun1 in this frame
“Nunally in his intense desire for
revenge, offers to plant false evidence
through his contact at the evidence
room.” (IMDB)
Reviewer: “I was also a little confused
about how far Nunelly went in planting
the fake gun. … Did Nunally also switch
slugs [i.e. bullets] at the evidence locker
so that they’d match the bogus gun?”
(IMDB)
The fake gun is a real gun, albeit not
the murder weapon
 Planted(gun) Murder weapon(gun’’)

Elements Elements
perpetrator --
victim suspect
gun gun gun’’ gun’’
crime crime’’
Relations Relations
Put-on Perpetrator’s Inspectors’ and Be-found-on
(perp,gun,victim) Knowledge Court’s Belief (gun’’,suspect)
Commit Commit-with
(¬victim,crime) gun’ (suspect,crime’’,
gun’’)

Fake

framing (i.e., planting evidence) scenario

What this example has taught us
• Fake is not an intrinsically privative operator.
• Fake instructs us to look for a difference between
two perspectives on the same object.
• These perspectives are not a matter of considering
stable central vs. diagnostic features of that object;
they’re about different people’s viewpoints.
• Knowing how to interpret fake N requires that we
are familiar (from real life or from works of fiction)
with different forms of deceit, i.e. with several
complex frames of human behaviour.
Extreme context-dependence?
Does the interpretation of fake differ from N to N?
No. There’s always the notion of deception:
something is presented as a particular thing to
someone while someone else (the deceiver) knows it
isn’t really such a thing.
Fake differs from fun in that respect.
e.g. A: “Roller coasters are fun.” – B: “No, they’re not.”
both utterances can be true, relative to the separate
contexts, which are linked up with two individuals
(Lasersohn 2005)

Lasersohn, Peter. 2005. Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of

personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy. 28(6), 643-686.
Note on usage-based effects
• We probably do not compute the meaning of fake gun, fake
beard, etc. anew on each encounter
• Some of these frequent combinations are likely to be stored,
along with their typical (frame-semantic) meaning.
e.g. fake gun = ‘toy or replica gun of the type that is sometimes
used to threaten people in a robbery’
e.g. fake object = (in linguistics) object NP not licensed by the
verb
• Even so, we can always ‘pull apart’ the elements of such a
frequent combination and interpret it afresh if necessary
e.g. fake gun = ‘gun1/2 whereby there’s a discrepancy between
what the speaker knows and others know about
it’
 Partial network of stored items
Adj N

fake

fakeAdj fakeV fakeN

fake N Copula fake

fake beard fake fur fake gun fake smile be fake look fake
Playing with perspectives
Language use is full of apparent nonsense if we don’t
acknowledge the ease with which we shift from one
perspective to another
Special except construction
“Blogging is dead… except it isn’t.” (www)
“So, language is quicksand—except it’s not.” (www)
“He “ended two wars” except that they haven’t ended at all,
they’ve merely evolved into something even worse than when
he took office.” (www)

2 voices:
- 1st part reflects the ‘received opinion’, presented as discourse-
old (or as information the hearer can easily accommodate)
- 2nd part is the author’s contrasting view
Split self and shifting reference
“If I1 were you, I2’d hate myself2.” (Lakoff & Sweetser 1994: ix)
Lisa Simpson [browsing through her mother’s graded school
papers]: “Mom1, these grades are amazing. Just as good as
mine. But then you2 wound up like you1.”

2 perspectives on a person: as the ‘real’ person1 and as a

person2 identifying with the hearer or a former self

Lakoff, George and Eve Sweetser. 1994. Foreword. Gilles Fauconnier. Mental
Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, ix-xvi.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Most complex example ever
“‘Why? Be reasonable, Bertie. If you1 were your1 aunt, and
you2 knew the sort of chap you1 were, would you2 let a fellow
you2 knew to be your1 best pal tutor your2 son?’
This made the old head swim a bit, but I got his meaning
after a while, and I had to admit that there was much rugged
good sense in what he said.” (P.G. Wodehouse)
Negative existentials
“Unicorns do not exist.” (or “Pegasus / Santa Claus / God / ...
does not exist”)
“There is no such things as a free lunch” (or “… bad publicity /
coincidence / German humour / …”)
‘Problem’ of negative existentials
In order to deny that something exists, you need to
presuppose its existence in the first place
“Did not the statement, “You do not exist,” contain a logical
absurdity?” (Orwell, 1984)
Cf. Meinong-Russell debate in early 20th-century philosophy
about non-existing objects
• Meinong: things can have a kind of being without existing
(‘subsistence’)
• Russell: Unicorns do not exist: ‘Each thing is such that it is
not a horse with a single narwhal-toothlike horn on its head’
This ‘problem’ is a non-problem
‘Problem’ of negative existentials vanishes if we accept that
things may or may not exist depending on the perspective.

M (speaker’s “reality”) M’ (world of myths)

“Unicorns do not exist”

Problem brushed away too easily?
“God does not exist”: how is this meaningful to a believer?

M (speaker’s “reality”) M’ (world of myths)

A possible solution
For the purpose of the conversation, the hearer-believer must
be willing to construct a transient, ad-hoc mental space
configuration that corresponds to the speaker’s

Cf. presupposition accommodation (Von Fintel 2008)

“I am sorry that I am late. I had to take my daughter to the
doctor”.

Von Fintel, Kai, 2008. What is presupposition accommodation, again? Philos.

Perspect. 22 (1), 137--170.
The Liar paradox
“This sentence is false.” (Or: “It’s true, I’m a liar.”)
• Both true and false if it’s either true or false
• Or “neither true nor false”, “lacking a truth value”, “logically
inconsistent”, “not definitely true”, “gappy”, “meaningless”,
“ungrammatical”, “indeterminate”, “uncategorical”,
“ungrounded”, …
• Challenge for any theory of truth
Liar-like situations in real life
• “Don’t listen to what I say.”
• “I’m not saying anything.”
• Study by John Ioannidis: many highly cited clinical research
articles in Journal of American Medical Association are
subsequently contradicted. (His study appeared in JAMA,
with 771 citations!)

We tend to ignore the self-defeating nature of such cases.

We assume speakers observe the cooperative principle
(Grice 1975): what people say furthers some purpose

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.),
Syntax and Semantics 3, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
The Liar sentence in logic
“This statement is not true.” (‘Strengthened Liar’)
• We can’t ‘coerce’ this, giving it a sloppy reading
• That’s precisely what logicians like about it
• Linguists will point out it’s just an unacceptable sentence
• Does it violate the law of non-contradiction?
• I would say: no!
• It’s true and not true at different times of the
interpretation process.
Making sense of the Liar
Suppose you hear for the first time, “This statement is not true.”
• Viewed from the perspective of what we typically do when we hear a
statement, we tentatively assume it’s a true claim.
• Viewed from the perspective of the information we then add to our
knowledge base, we accept that it’s the case that this statement (whatever
that statement may be!) is said not to be true.
• We then realize that we’ve been tricked, as this statement is the entire
sentence, which we assumed to be true.
• We have no new information about anything, so it’s a blatant violation of
Grice’s Maxim of Quantity.
• If we still assume the speaker is cooperative, then we must look for what the
speaker is trying to do.
• Aha, maybe it was some kind of joke!
The Liar as some kind of joke
• “Answer, yes or no, will your next answer be no?”
• Pinocchio paradox:

• “I used to believe in reincarnation, but that was long

ago, in another life.”
Time to wrap up
A curiously overlooked fact, some linguistic lessons, and a
pragmatic view on paradoxes
A curiously overlooked fact
Fake does different things with the noun in e.g. fake
gun and fake painting, on their default readings
This is evident from the ironic quotation marks test
• a fake “gun” (OK, unless in the framing frame)
truly privative
• *?a fake “painting” (not OK, unless it’s just a photograph)
not truly privative
Linguistic lessons
• We must abandon strict compositionality based on essential
vs. non-essential features of the meaning of N.
• Instead, except for stored exemplars, the hearer must make
sense of fake N in context, trying to figure out which
diverging perspectives are being hinted at.
• Rich, frame-based knowledge is required for that.
e.g. the forging frame is needed to understand fake painting
“An Agent produces a Forgery, an entity that they intend to pass off
as a particular (instance of) a Standard. An instance of
the Standard may actually exist that served as an original that is
copied by the Agent, or the Standard exists only as an idea.”
(FrameNet)

“forging”. FrameNet. University of California at Berkeley. 27 October 2015.

A pragmatic view on paradoxes
• Apparent paradox is not hopelessly paradoxical.
• What’s a real paradox for me may not be one for you –
that is one of “the ways of paradox,” as Quine would say
• A ‘privative’ construction incorporates two perspectives:
your own belief/view and that of someone else
• Playing with perspectives is pervasive in language
use.
e.g. the Proposition Rejection Except Construction
• Perspectives + Grice may allow us to see the Liar
paradox for what it is: a form of humour.
Many thanks!
For slides etc., contact me:
bert.cappelle@univ-lille3.fr