Some Objections to the Meaninglessness Solution to the Liar Paradox, Part I of IV (original) (raw)

Elsewhere (and in my dissertation), I've argued at length that "Liar sentences", like:

(1) The sentence marked (1) is not true.

or

(2) The sentence marked (2) is either false or meaningless.

...and, for precisely, the same reason, "Truth-Teller" sentences, like:

(3) The sentences marked (3) is true.

....and, of course, conditionalized truth-tellers (better known as "Curry sentences"), like

(4) If this sentence is true, the author of the blog post it appears in is a dialetheist.

.....are quite literally meaningless. "Wait," I can hear you asking, "doesn't that make (2) true?" I've written extensively about that question in the past, but the short answer is "no." A sentence with the grammatical form of a disjunction and a "second disjunct" that, if the same words in the same order were split off into a sentence of their own, would constitute a meaningful-and-true sentence, does not thereby become a meaningful sentence, much less a true one. For example, take (5), adapted from the classical example of a meaningless-but-"well-formed" sentence:

(5) Either colorless green ideas sleep furiously or snow is white.

There is, clearly, no contradiction in asserting both (6):

(6) (5) is meaningless.

....and (7):

(7) Snow is white.

....at the same time. Now, this is a very unpopular solution to the paradoxes--which is part of what makes it interesting enough to spend years developing arguments for!--but one which there are few extensive arguments against. Many theorists interested in the paradoxes--especially those interested in non-classical approaches--just brush it off out of hand as not worth taking seriously. Graham Priest derisively refers to it in In Contradiction as "the heroic solution." Hartry Field says in the introduction to Saving Truth From Paradox that people who endorse meaninglessness solutions must mean the term "meaningless" in "some special technical way", so that what they're saying must amount to a strangely-expressed version of his own paracomplete solution.

(I've always tried to be clear that I mean the word "meaningless" is precisely the ordinary mundane sense. As a result of my version of extreme deflationism about truth, I take the sentences that JC Beall calls "TTruth-inelimable" to be literally meaningless in precisely the same sense as a string of nonsense syllables, or "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Click on the link above for a less abbreviated explanation, but, basically, I agree with and take literally Quine's claim that sentences that ascribe truth to other sentences mean nothing above and beyond what the original sentences mean--that's the original metaphor behind the term "disquotationalism," that the upshot of prefixing a quoted sentence with the words 'it is true that' is to "remove the quotation marks"--and I generalize this to the claim that all truth-ascribing sentences necessarily inherit their meaning from the sentences to which they ascribe it. Thus, for example, "'colorless green ideas sleep furiously' is true" ends up being meaningless, because it inherits no meaning from the sentence to which it tries to ascribe truth. For precisely the same reason, "this sentence is true" is meaningless. And, of course, as Carnap was fond of pointing out, the negation of nonsense is nonsense.)

In the same spirit as Field's disguised-paracompleteness objection, when I met a regular reader of this blog, at the Eastern APA before last, we chatted about the Liar Paradox and he said he'd have to wait to "see the technical details" before he knew if it would "work."

I have, of course, a philosophical argument for the claim, and a lot of responses to various actual and potential objections, by the very nature of the solution, there aren't and can't be any "technical details." (There's plenty of nit-picky precision work--particularly when it comes to formulating and responding to "revenge paradoxes"--but that's not what most Liar specialist mean when they talk about "technical details.") The necessary absence of technical details strike right at the heart of the difference between the meaninglessness solution and more standard ones--that nothing technical needs to be revised in any way, shape or form on account of the semantic pardoxes is one of the chief selling points of the solution! We get to keep "the naive theory of truth" rather than any of the elaborate 'technical' theories that have proliferated in the post-Tarski/post-Kripke era. We get to keep classical logic, classical T-in and T-out rules, and, in short, we get to keep everything except for the intuition that many professional philosophers report having about the semantic status of the sentences in question.

So no, no "technical details" of the kind fashionable in theories of the Liar. There are not and could not be special rules (whether thought of as logicially revisionary or placed 'on top of' the logical edifice regulating particular predicates or operators related to truth or meaninglessness) about, say, the precise behavior of M(P) and ~M(P), because, if a sentence is meaningless, to symbolize it with a letter and trying to perform logical operations on it is to commit the same nonsensical category mistake which would be committed if some very confused logician tried to do the same to a cough or a string of nonsense syllables or a bit of burning candle wax.

The most common argument against the meaninglessness sentence is a simple foot-stamping appeal to intuition. Sadly, X-phi has not yet provided us with any empirical evidence about how widely shared the intuitions in question are, so it's hard to know whether those who take it as obvious that such sentences are meaningful are right when they assert that it's generally obvious to everyone pre-philosophically, but whether they're right or wrong, it's clearly possible for competent speakers of a natural language to be mistaken about questions of meaningfulness. For example, the philosophers of the Vienna Circle were competent speakers of German, but they mistakenly took many perfectly meaningful German sentences about metaphysical subjects to be meaningless. In fact, even if we *wanted* to be semantic Cartesians, holding idealized views about the privileged access of competent speakers to the status of sentences as meaningful or meaningless, we couldn't, because there are disputes in which, whoever is right, someone is a competent speaker making this mistake. For example, Graham Priest and I are both competent speakers of English, and we disagree about the meaningfulness of Liar sentences. Whichever one of us is right, the other one is a competent speaker of a natural language who has made a mistake about meaningfulness.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with appeals to intuition--we can hardly do without them entirely--but, given a good argument and a good error theory, initial intuitive assessments are often shown to be false. Arrogantly enough, of course, I take myself to have both.

What about, however, the following more sophisticated variant on this sort of objection? (It was presented to me by a junior faculty member at the University of Miami a year or so ago, and I don't think I took it seriously enough at the time.) Someone like me, who says that Liars are meaningless, has presumably been convinced of it by prolonged reflection on the paradox. In the course of this, they've sifted through various possible diagnoses of the sentences in question, thinking about consequences of various approaches, objections to failed solutions and so on. Right? Well, then, wait a damn second. Doesn't all of this involve reasoning about what does and doesn't follow from these supposedly meaningless sentences, in conjunction with various other claims. For example, to embrace the meaninglessness analysis is to reject the analysis that says that Liar sentences are meaningful but that they don't express propositions. Presumably, in explaining why the meaninglessness analysis is superior, its partisans want to bring up "revenge paradoxes" like (8). (At any rate, I certainly want to bring it up!)

(8) The sentence marked as (8) does not express a true proposition.

If (8) doesn't express a proposition, it doesn't express a true one, just as if a cat isn't a dog, it isn't a black dog. And anyone who endorsed the meaningful-but-not-expressing-a-proposition analysis presumably doesn't think a sentence can be true without expressing a true proposition--after all, if truth can exist without propositions, why clutter one's ontology with them? Thus, the solution under consideration collapses into contradiction.

Now, while I tend to lean skeptical on the subject, I'm officially agnostic about the existence of propositions. I take its neutrality on this topic to be a big selling point of my preferred approach. (For the sake of simplicity, I usually talk about "sentences", but wherever I talk about "sentences" being true or false, an enthusiast for propositions can always mentally subsitute some phrase about the propositions expressed by those sentences being true or false...and, of course, presumably, if propositions exist at all, only meaningful sentences can express them, so if I'm right that Liars are meaningless, it follows that they don't express propositions any more than bits of burning candlewax express propositions.) If, however, I abandoned my agnosticism in favor of a full-throated embrace of propositions, I'd presumably be forced to classify (8) as meaningless as well. (If I abandoned it in the opposite direction, matters would be quite different. After all, if there are no such things as propositions, it's true of every sentence that it doesn't express one!) Certainly, I view more common revenge paradoxes, like (9):

(9) The sentence marked as (9) has some status other than 'true.'

....or the familiar anti-dialetheist revenge paradox (10):

(10) This sentence is just false, rather than being both true and false.

.....as being meaningless, and still deploy them against the approaches to the paradoxes that I reject, using standard Liar reasoning, like everyone else does. Doesn't the fact that I'm able to play this game as well as anyone else, that we all understand and can use the rules against each other, proof that the sentences are meaningful, that, after all, we all understand what they mean?

To which I say.......

Good question. Tune in on Wednesday!