- Jubilee offer: spend £10 or more on any product sold by Amazon.co.uk on or before June 6 and you can buy The Diamond Jubilee A Classical Celebration Album for just £2.50 Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Product details
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Review
"A splendid book. [The authors] have striking new ideas and material. These they have thought through deftly and masterfully....This is a book to seize the philosophical imagination."--Mind
"We see from The Liar that the paradoxes are still a source of inspiration and logic. The book is a new, exciting contribution to the study of truth....It can be read not only as a contribution to the philosophy of language, but also as an interesting application of a theory of sets. It contains interesting theorems and in turn it will stimulate purely mathematical work."--Larry Moss, Bulletin of the American Math Society
"Exploiting Peter Aczel's theory of 'hypersets'...the authors propose an interesting new solution to the liar paradox....The Liar is a significant addition to the recent best literature on the paradox."--Choice
"The work grew out of research aimed at drawing up a mathematically rigorous account of language, so that computers can understand human speech....In their book
Product Description
This monograph purports to provide a solution to semantical paradoxes like the Liar. The authors base this solution on J. L. Austin's idea of truth, which is fundamental to situation semantics. They compare two models of language, propositions and truth, one based on Russell and the other on Austin, as they bear on the Liar Paradox. In Russell's view, a sentence expresses a proposition, which is true or not. According to Austin, however, there is always a contextual parameter - the situation the sentence is about - that comes between the sentence and proposition. The Austinian perspective proves to have fruitful applications to the analysis of semantic paradox. The authors show that, on this account, the liar is a genuine diagonal argument. This argument can be shown to have profound consequences for our understanding of some of the most basic semantical mechanisms at work in our language. Jon Barwise is, with John Perry, a co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book contains a potentially very valuable insight regarding the classical liar paradox ('this sentence is untrue'), in that it shows that the paradox can be resolved by using the concept of 'situations': views of partial knowledge that summarise our current knowledge. Put briefly, if I am in situation s and I want to assign a truth value to the liar sentence in s, then I have to extend my knowledge by proceeding to some larger situation s'.
Unfortunately, though this is an important insight, the authors bury it under a tonne of mathematical formalism. Thus we get digressions on a non-standard set theory and on proof theory, but little discussion of the basic ideas underlying the treatment of the paradox, and what this means for epistemology. In particular, the significance of truth gaps (making a distinction between negation and denial) is hinted at but not treated with sufficient depth (one senses that the authors wish to steer clear of the topic).
So, the book contains an important philosophical idea, but the presentation is overly mathematical, and results in the idea being hidden from view.
Unfortunately, though this is an important insight, the authors bury it under a tonne of mathematical formalism. Thus we get digressions on a non-standard set theory and on proof theory, but little discussion of the basic ideas underlying the treatment of the paradox, and what this means for epistemology. In particular, the significance of truth gaps (making a distinction between negation and denial) is hinted at but not treated with sufficient depth (one senses that the authors wish to steer clear of the topic).
So, the book contains an important philosophical idea, but the presentation is overly mathematical, and results in the idea being hidden from view.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
2 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Very good read.
7 Aug 2009
Format:Paperback
Anyone at all familiar with epistemology will note the frustrating fact all of our categorical statements are subject to the self referential fallacy. For example, the relativist who asserts "All truth is relative" has just asserted a self defeating statement since he obviously wishes this statement to be the one exception. Afterall, if all truth is relative, so is the truth value of this statement, which henceforth is not true according to its own critieria. Of course, this isn't limited to formal statements which we assign as saying something about the world. Kurt Godel has shown that even statements whose extension is purely formal, and not empirical, contain paradox and pitfalls. The authors take their own knowledge in Symbolic Logic and attempt to look at these issues from a new angle. They don't merely repeat the same theses you see in other books and so the book is valuable for this reason. Merleau-Ponty, who was a follower of Heidegger, presented these issues in all their perplexity in his book "The Visible and the Invisible." In comparison, I prefer the analytic philosophical approach of the former over the phenomenological approach of the latter. However, both schools of thought are capable of giving profound insight on this topic of language and epistemological conundrums. Underlying all of these types of works, including this one, seems to be those continual debates that see no merits in the contravening philosophical position. Most noteworthy is the authors' failure to consider bibical theology as an intellecutal contribution to insights about the condition of human intelligence in a fallen world. For this reason, the book loses one star.
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > History > Countries & Regions > Australasia & Pacific > Australasia > Australia
- Books > History > Countries & Regions > Australasia & Pacific > Australasia > New Zealand
- Books > History > World History
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Philosophy
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Linguistics > Reference
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Linguistics > Semantics
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
