The Liar

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. Despite the antiquity of the famous Liar Paradox, and its genuine importance to semantics, no satisfactory analysis of it has yet been given. In this book the authors bring powerful new tools from set theory and the philosophy of language to bear in proposing a novel solution to the paradox.

In the source of their study of a language admitting circular reference and containing its own truth predicate, the authors also develop a wide range of model-theoretic techniques that open up new avenues in logic and semantics.