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Patterns of paradox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Roy T. Cook*
Affiliation:
Arché: The AHRB Centre for the Philosophy of Logic, Language, Mathematics, and Mind School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies, University of St. Andrews, UK, E-mail: rtcl@st-andrews.ac.uk

Extract

We begin with a prepositional language Lp containing conjunction (Λ), a class of sentence names {Sα}αϵA, and a falsity predicate F. We (only) allow unrestricted infinite conjunctions, i.e., given any non-empty class of sentence names {Sβ}βϵB,

is a well-formed formula (we will use WFF to denote the set of well-formed formulae).

The language, as it stands, is unproblematic. Whether various paradoxes are produced depends on which names are assigned to which sentences. What is needed is a denotation function:

For example, the LP sentence “F(S1)” (i.e., Λ{F(S1)}), combined with a denotation function δ such that δ(S1)“F(S1)”, provides the (or, in this context, a) Liar Paradox.

To give a more interesting example, Yablo's Paradox [4] can be reconstructed within this framework. Yablo's Paradox consists of an ω-sequence of sentences {Sk}kϵω where, for each n ϵ ω:

Within LP an equivalent construction can be obtained using infinite conjunction in place of universal quantification - the sentence names are {Si}iϵω and the denotation function is given by:

We can express this in more familiar terms as:

etc.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2004

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References

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[4]Yablo, S., Paradox without self-reference, Analysis, vol. 53 (1993), pp. 251252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar