26 alan weir

Rejoinder to Laurence Goldstein on the Liar

Alan Weir

Laurence Goldstein (2001) argues that my ‘Token relativism and the Liar’
(Weir 2000), whilst making some incisive points against the ‘token rela-
tivist’ position, is ineffectual against his own position ‘which has its roots
in a medieval tradition, and which not only withstands [Weir’s] attack, but
also emerges stronger for doing so’ (Goldstein 2001: 116).
Token relativism, which Goldstein thinks of as a diluted version of his
approach, holds that different tokens of the same sentence can have dif-
ferent truth values even though no ‘compositional’ component of meaning
differs nor is there any reference shift in context-dependent terms. Thus
consider the following two tokens of the same sentence type, tokens which
are displayed on successive lines 1 and 2:

Analysis 62.1, January 2002, pp. 26–34. © Alan Weir

 rejoinder to laurence goldstein on the liar 27

The token on line 1 is untrue.

The token on line 1 is untrue.

In this case, the token on the first line ‘malfunctions’, according to the
token relativist, and is therefore neither true nor false, a fortiori untrue.
And the token relativist theory is supposed to explain how we may coher-
ently use the second token on line 2 to make this point.
Goldstein objects (i) that tokens are not truth-bearers, rather statements
are; (ii) the problem cases I raised for this token relativist view were need-
lessly complicated – ‘epimenidean’ – and if ‘de-epimenidized’ one could see
more clearly that: (iii) the token on line 1 malfunctions and so indeed lacks
a truth value in the same way as does every contradictory sentence, accord-
ing to Goldstein. This appeal to the alleged vacuity of contradictions is
then held to constitute a solution to the Liar which depends ‘on no ad
hoc hypotheses’ but is one ‘motivated by considerations independent of
the Liar paradox’ (125).
As to (i), Goldstein says ‘When the Pope says something, what he says is
generally … true’ (117, italics in original). Tokens of that quoted sentence
have the same truth value but radically different effects as uttered in dif-
ferent parts of Belfast, whence I write, thus refuting (Dr. Johnson-style) the
pragmatic theory of truth. Goldstein, however, rejects this way of putting
things – it is not the token utterances of the Pope which have truth values,
‘It is the content of his utterances that are true or false’ (117).
In reply, I doubt whether it is a determinate fact of English that ‘true’
cannot be applied to sentences or tokens. However I accept that a single
physical token may be used to make different utterances with different
truth values as in Goldstein’s little flag with ‘these are cheese sandwiches’
inscribed which is moved from cheesey sandwich pile to uncheesy sand-
wich pile (116). I allowed (Weir 2000: 157) that utterances could be truth-
bearers and noted that Gaifman’s ‘pointers’, the basic elements of his
sophisticated form of token relativism (Gaifman 1992), are more general
than tokens (Weir 2000: 158, n. 3). Perhaps ‘utterance relativism’ would
be a better, if less resonant, title. More importantly, I argued that if it is
really propositions (or statements) which are truth-bearers, one could
still apply the predicate ‘expresses a true statement’ directly to tokens or
utterances.
The point of doing so was to block responses to the paradox which
appeal to reference failure in the subject term. Some theorists hold that
‘this statement is untrue’ is unparadoxically neither true nor false on the
(contestable) grounds that sentences with empty subject terms are truth-
valueless, their idea being that the subject term ‘this statement’ fails to refer
because no unique statement is singled out in the context. Even if this is
so, I argued, this solution would not generalize to cover ‘this sentence is
28 alan weir

untrue’ or ‘this sentence token is untrue’ where ‘untrue’ is read as ‘fails to

express a true statement’, since the subject term in these cases unproblem-
atically refers (156). Goldstein’s answer to this point amounts to saying:
forget about these problem cases, concentrate solely on examples which his
type of theory can cope with!
To be sure, Goldstein does not appeal to reference failure in order to
solve the paradoxes, even at junctures where he might reasonably do so.
He says of the phrase
the statement which is true iff it itself is not true
that it ‘is a vacuous biconditional of the form (Fx ´ ~Fx)’ (123). Actually
it is a definite description, its natural formalisation is
ix(Statement x & (True x ´ ~True x))
and since (treating definite descriptions as genuine singular terms) ixjx
need not satisfy j if there is no unique j, one might conclude that ix(State-
ment x & (True x ´ ~True x)) does not exist. Any paradox which results
is not a semantic one but one of that different strain relating to empty
terms, negative existentials and so forth.
Goldstein does not proceed along those lines though, and the issue of
truth-bearers turns out to be an irrelevance. His ‘wannabe statements’ seem
to play just the role that meaningful utterances of tokens do for me. So long
as we are allowed to predicate, of arbitrary tokens or utterances, ‘expresses
the truth’ or allowed to predicate ‘truth’ of wannabes (if not, Goldstein’s
position that some paradoxical wannabe statements are neither true nor
false is inexpressible) then paradox arises in just the way I said.
Thus I refuse to accept Goldstein’s ‘rewritings’ of my problem cases. The
final example (Weir 2000: 160) was a rather complex one, the complexity
arising because I wished to extrude as far as possible context-dependent
terms so as to render implausible solutions which appeal to a context-shift
(158, especially n. 2) and wished to respond (159–60) to a suggestion from
Michael Clark (1999) as to how a token-relativatist theory might avoid
recalcitrant ‘super-Liars’. If one reworks that example in terms not of truth
of tokens but truth of the statements expressed then the result is:
Some token of any sentence equivalent to ‘All tokens of the first
sentence containing ‘equivalent’ in this article fail to express true
statements’ expresses a true statement
and this yields antinomy by essentially the same route as before (160).
Goldstein’s second main point is that examples such as the above are
needlessly complicated – ‘epimenidean’ – and when shorn of this com-
plexity are seen to be soluble by his ‘cassationist’ theory which holds that
these paradoxical sentences ‘malfunction’. As I have indicated, I do not
think the complexity is needless. Note that it is crucial to the credibility of
 rejoinder to laurence goldstein on the liar 29

Goldstein’s position that when one shears away the complexity one is left
with essentially the same purported counter-example, its inner nature
revealed, rather than a different example entirely. For the dialectic of these
debates about the Liar is along the following lines. Firstly, someone puts
forward a theory which purports to explain in a non-ad hoc fashion how
the simple or strengthened Liar does not lead to antinomy and then a critic
attempts to convict this theory of the ‘holiday luggage’ problem: a solution
which fixes some paradoxical sentences leads to antinomies bursting out of
the suitcase somewhere else, often in less simple forms. The theorist might
then try to complicate her theory further to handle these cases; the critic
puts forward further, perhaps more complex cases, and so on until it
becomes clear that the theory will never surmount the holiday luggage
problem or that so many epicycles have been added that it has become
hopelessly ad hoc. Now if our theorist simply refuses to consider any new
problem cases then of course she will never be faced with a possible refu-
tation of her theory, however bad it is; but I take this to be a fatal weak-
ness, not a strength, of this otherwise attractively simple methodological
position.1
Is Goldstein’s response simply an example of ignoratio elenchi, then? The
overall strategy of his ‘de-epimenidization’ is to take a theory T with some
problematic consequence q, and to view the theory as a conjunction of
components q & p, where this conjunction is equivalent to T. For example,
if T is a universal generalization of the form "xjx then ja & "x(x π a Æ
jx) may be just such a conjunction in which ja isolates the objectionable
features of T. Goldstein gives an example along these lines: Epimenides’
alleged utterance ‘All Cretans are liars’, he claims,
amounts to ‘All statements (including this one) made by any Cretan
are false’ (Goldstein 2001: 121)
and this in turn can be ‘rewritten’ as ‘this statement is false and so are all
other statements made by Cretans’, where this second conjunct is just, he
says, ‘noise’ (122). Now in the first place, this ‘rewriting’ does not preserve
logical equivalence: even allowing for the difference between being a liar
and always uttering falsehoods
All Cretans always tell falsehoods
is not logically equivalent to
This statement is false and this statement is made by a Cretan and any
statement distinct from this one made by a Cretan is false
1
Goldstein would appear to agree – cf. his reference to Yablo’s paradox as being non-
self-referential ‘so a whole wodge of ‘solutions’ is immediately relegated to the scrap
heap’, adding ‘Solutions to a family of paradoxes face an acid test when a new variant
is discovered’ (Goldstein 1994: 223, 224).
30 alan weir

since, for one thing, the first sentence does not entail that ‘this statement is
made by a Cretan’ even if we fix on a context in which ‘this statement’ does
actually refer to one made by Epimenides the Cretan.
More importantly, suppose a paradoxical sentence s genuinely is equiva-
lent to F & p, where F is some blatant falsehood.2 It does not follow that
a semantics which provides a good account of the nature of the falsehood
F also provides a coherent account of the meaning of sentence s itself. In a
footnote (n. 11, 122–23), Goldstein quotes from private email correspon-
dence in which I say that if we apply his CC principle (in the example above
CC enjoins: ignore s and focus on F) then ‘we might remove the point of
interest of the antinomies’. He replies, ‘True and we must ensure that every
application of CC cuts only the crap. This helps us see what is false in intui-
tively true theories.’ This makes it look as if the point of the CC principle
is to salvage a good coherent theory from some antinomic theory. One
might think here of how, on some accounts, ZF was salvaged from naive
set theory, or Tarskian truth theories from the naive truth schema.3
But extracting good theories from bad is not what is at issue here, the
task is rather that of providing a coherent semantics for paradoxical sen-
tences such as the Russell sentence or the Liar or, most relevantly in this
context, variants thereof which arise in connection with some semantics
which has been proposed as a solution to the Liar. The injunction to ignore
those paradoxical sentences which continue to defeat one’s theory has all
the notorious virtues of theft over honest toil.
What finally, of the third component of Goldstein’s position, his positive
theory that the vacuity of contradictions provides an explanatory account
of the pathological nature of the Liar? That this view of contradictions is
radical is no objection in itself; the apparent invincibility of the Liar in its
war with those who would tame it suggests strongly that a satisfactory
solution is bound to be radical. But we must count carefully the costs of
radical solutions. In Goldstein’s case, if contradictions express no state-
ments and such failure is preserved by negation, then logical theorems
express no statements either; presumably this also holds true of mathe-
matical theorems.4 This of course was the view of the early Wittgenstein
2
Note that if s happens to be inconsistent, relative to the background theory T, then it
is equivalent, again relative to T, to  & p, where  is the absurdity constant and p
is any sentence, consistent or inconsistent. Here though, I assume, against Goldstein
(Goldstein 2001: 121) that the background logic of theory T contains the rule ex falso
quodlibet. See below for a criticism of his argument against the rule.
3
As the previous footnote shows, this is not a mechanical matter of expressing the
rejected theory as a conjunction of absurdity conjoined with, one hopes, melodious
‘noise’.
4
More generally, the view has problems explaining the truth conditions of sentences
which contain contradictions as sub-formulae.
 rejoinder to laurence goldstein on the liar 31

whom Goldstein is consciously following. Such a view runs the risk of

being exposed as either orthodoxy dressed up to look radical, or else as
absurd. If ‘expresses no statement’ simply means ‘expresses no contingent
empirical statement’, then the Wittgensteinian view suffers the first fate,
at least to those whose orthodoxy is not Quinean. On the other hand, to
the extent that the Wittgensteinian assimilates contradictions to blatant
gibberish such as (resisting many a tempting choice of example from
other philosophical traditions) nonsense poetry, then it suffers the second
fate.
One clear way to explicate what it is to fail to express a statement is by
reference to the T-scheme: any grammatical sentence of a language which
is not a legitimate instance of the homophonic T-scheme for that language
(questions are a popular, though not uncontentious, example) fails to
express a statement. (Of course much work remains to be done by propo-
nents of this view on what it is to be a legitimate instance of the T-scheme.)
Goldstein holds that the T-scheme does not hold for ‘FAs’; here ‘FA’ stands
not for the soi-disant ‘Football Assocation’, rather, an FA is a ‘failed at-
tempt’ at making a statement. And he argues that contradictions are FAs,
one and all, so presumably holds that e.g.
‘1 = 1 & 1 π 1’ is true iff 1 = 1 & 1 π 1
is not a legitimate instance of the T-scheme for English.
Does Goldstein mean anything more by ‘malfunctions’ or ‘fails to
express a statement’ than ‘falls outside the scope of the T-scheme’? It would
seem so: some grammatical sentences built up in the usual way from
meaningful components are not components of genuine instances of any
inference rule, according to Goldstein:
the very first line of the Lewis proof of ex falso quodlibet is a deriva-
tion by the rule ‘&-elimination’ of one of the conjuncts of a contra-
diction. If … a contradiction is vacuous, then, on the intuitive belief
that nothing but nothing can be inferred from nothing, we can reject
the first line of that proof. The rule ‘&-elimination’ applies to con-
junctive statements not to FAs. (121)
So no licit instance of an inference rule contains an FA. By the same
token, then, there is no rule of reductio ad absurdum of the form:
given a proof of B & ~B from X together with A conclude ~A and
discharge A.
Every grammatical instance of this rule must be rejected since the immedi-
ate premiss of the application, B & ~B, is vacuous. Not being already con-
vinced that RAA is illicit, I take this to be a reductio ad absurdum of
Goldstein’s position. To be sure, one could achieve the same effect as the
RAA rule in a system which lacks it, a purely axiomatic system with modus
32 alan weir

ponens as the only rule, say. But the strong intuitions of the correctness
of the RAA rule tells sufficiently against Goldstein’s position, in my view.
What is more, Goldstein seems to share this view:
The logical principle ‘reductio ad absurdum’ is … aptly named: an
assumption which leads, by good reasoning, to an absurdity, has to be
rejected. (Goldstein 2001: 120)
(See also the final paragraph, (119) where he says we can make inferences
from FAs.)
So suppose we accept it is legitimate to infer using FAs and characterize
them solely by the criterion of failure to come within the compass of the
T-scheme. Will that give a non-ad hoc account of even the simple Liars?
Note that every conventional resolution of the Liar restricts the T-scheme
in some way, the key question thus being, as dialetheists such as Priest
have emphasized: what non-arbitrary reason can be given for doing so?
Goldstein’s distinctive idea is to restrict by using the principle that contra-
dictions are not legitimate instances of the T-scheme; but this latter prin-
ciple is hardly, on its own, all that more explanatory than a dogmatic
and unprincipled butchering of the T-scheme. We naturally want to ask
why contradictions are not correctly assessed as (obviously) false, logical
‘truths’ not correctly so described. Goldstein’s argument for this view
(120–21) seems to be that no reasonable person would believe or sincerely
assert a blatant contradiction. Even if true, and of course dialetheists
will disagree, this does not entail such sentences are not false. Goldstein
seems committed to the view that if he says ‘I do not exist’ or ‘my head is
made of glass’ what he says is not false; once more I take this (here I
depend, in the second case, on fairly reliable testimony) as a reductio ad
absurdum.
But leaving that aside, the most glaring problem with Goldstein’s view is
that not only are Liar sentences not contradictions, not sentences of the
form A & ~A, neither are they logically equivalent to them. Even using the
full strength of classical logic, we need to use the T-scheme to get a con-
tradiction from such sentences as
l: l is not true
(using underlining as a meta-linguistic shortcut for the hard work of devel-
oping the syntax of a language within that language and diagonalizing).5
But Goldstein denies that the T-scheme applies to sentences such as l!

5
Appeal to classical logic, or a logic of similar strength, is itself a controversial move,
since one way to resolve the paradoxes is not to restrict the T-scheme but to restrict
the logic. This move is not only available to dialetheists. In Weir (1996) I suggest that
the inference from p ´ ~p to p & ~p is not unrestrictedly sound, and develop these
 rejoinder to laurence goldstein on the liar 33

The situation is even worse when we turn to ‘empirical’ liar cycles such
as
Calum: Orla’s next sentence is true
Orla: Calum’s last sentence is untrue
for now we need not only logic and the T-scheme to get contradiction but
also empirical facts concerning what Orla says next and what Calum said
before her. It will not do to say that p is vacuous if it is equivalent to a con-
tradiction relative to the set G of ‘grounded truths’. Even if one can help
oneself to some reasonable notion of a grounded truth, this theory will
have the consequence that there are no false propositions corresponding to
the truths determined by the set G. For suppose ~p is a truth which follows
from G. Then ~p  p ´ (p & ~p) hence, granted simple transitivity, G  p
´ (p & ~p), so that p is, on this view, neither true nor false, a fortiori not
false.
There is, indeed, one way to make sense of Goldstein’s position. One
could treat the fundamental bearers of the property ‘expresses a truth’
as tokens, utterances or something of that sort and then, starting from
the grounded truths, formulate a recursive algorithm which makes the T-
scheme come out true ‘as far as possible’. This is Gaifman’s idea which I
criticized in the original article in question, and those criticisms remain
untouched by Goldstein’s points. Goldstein thinks that Gaifman’s position
is a diluted version of a medieval position. It is undoubtedly true that
analytic philosophers have often simply re-invented, in their ignorance,
scholastic positions (an ignorance which is, however, much less marked
than it was); the view of tokens as truth-bearers which Goldstein criticizes
is perhaps one example.6 But the ‘preacher’ exaggerated when he saith
there is no new thing under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1: 9): it is no slight on
medieval logicians to note that inductive theories of truth, and variants
such as Gaifman’s, are one clear case.
In short, Goldstein’s first criticism regarding truth-bearers was already
covered in my original article, his second point on reducing complexity
commits the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi and his positive theory, far from

ideas further in Weir 1998a §11 and Weir 1998b. Perhaps Goldstein’s neglect of or
indifference to the distinction between definite descriptions which specify a para-
doxical sentence and a T-scheme ‘specification’ involving one – compare the vacuous
definite description cited above with ‘B is true iff S is not true’ (123) – helps blind him
to the need for further work to get ‘vacuous’ biconditionals, never mind contradic-
tions, from liar sentences.
6
‘For many medievals, it was the sentence token that was the bearer of truth value’
(Spade 1982: 251).
34 komarine romdenh-romluc

withstanding the attack I mounted on such theories as Gaifman’s, falls to

objections which the latter surmounts.7

Queen’s University, Belfast,

Belfast BT7 1NN, UK
a.weir@qub.ac.uk

References
Clark, M. 1999. Recalcitrant variants of the liar paradox. Analysis 59: 117–26.
Gaifman, H. 1992. Pointers to truth. The Journal of Philosophy 89: 223–61.
Goldstein, L. 1994. A Yabloesque paradox in set theory. Analysis 54: 223–27.
Goldstein, L. 2001. Truth-bearers and the Liar – a reply to Alan Weir. Analysis 61:
115–25.
Spade, P. 1982. Insolubilia. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed.
N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg, 246–54. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Weir, A. 1996. Ultra-maximalist minimalism! Analysis 56: 10–22.
Weir, A. 1998a. Naive set theory is innocent! Mind 107: 763–98.
Weir, A. 1998b. Naive set theory, paraconsistency and indeterminacy I. Logique et
Analyse 161–63: 219–66.
Weir, A. 2000. Token relativism and the Liar. Analysis 60: 156–70.

7
My thanks to Laurence Goldstein for discussing theses issues with me in
correspondence.

Analysis 62.1, January 2002, pp. 34–41. © Komarine Romdenh-Romluc