Mr. Neff Replies

To the Editor:

In this letter I should like to reply only to three of Mr. Bissell’s claims about my paper The Liar Is A Thief. Other than this I most probably shall not be publishing a detailed reply to his essay. I certainly shall not attempt to do so in a brief letter and risk incurring another charge of being cavalier. I shall, however, take into consideration his discussion in my speech “Self-Referential Paradoxes” listed in the SIL Speaker’s Bureau booklet (see page 21). I shall only state here that I consider Mr. Bissell’s solution to these paradoxes to be largely ad hoc and that it is possible to construct a large number of Liar paradoxes without the use of particular quantifiers such as “this”. Many of these other formulations are, furthermore, completely consistent with everything true Mr. Bissell has written about intentionality, and meet all requirements for possessing meaning. I employed as examples only the simpler of the Liar-propagating sentences, i.e., those which were most readily perceptible as generating contradictions.

Of the three points I want to take up here, the first involves Mr. Bissell’s claim that his is the position I deemed too mean to warrant further consideration, and less respectable than Diodorus Cronus’s alleged suicide. It is not. I was fully aware of the Veatch solution to the Liar paradox and rejected it as basically ad hoc when I wrote the paper. I did not discuss it in the body of the paper, because it would have involved much tedious discussion of intentionality and the nature of propositions, and made the essay entirely too long for publication in a libertarian, non-epistemological journal. The position I referred to in that manner was the position that there are some sentences which are neither true nor false, but which rather have the status of commands, wishes, prayers, questions, and the like. This is manifestly not Mr. Bissell’s position. His claim is that there are some sentences which are neither true nor false, but are, rather, meaningless. (I agree with him here. I just don’t agree that Liar-propagating sentences are among these.) He does not hold that commands, wishes, questions, or prayers are meaningless, and therefore does not hold that Liar-sentences have the same status as they.

The second concerns his claim that I have “unjustly” accused the Liar paradox of concept-stealing, supporting this with a discussion of the original Cretan version of this paradox and showing that it is indeed not guilty of concept-stealing. Which has nothing to do with any of my arguments. I was not talking about the original Cretan paradox, and, in fact, explained at the outset that it is not a paradox at all, but merely a false statement. This was an especially peculiar claim for Mr. Bissell to have made, in light of his own position; for if he is correct that “This sentence is false” is meaningless, then because it makes use of the concept “false”, which presupposes meaning, there is, in fact, an instance of concept-stealing here. In other words, Bissell’s own position would entail that this Liar-propagating sentence is an example of a stolen concept. It therefore makes no sense for him to complain that I have falsely maligned the Liar paradox, unless he wishes to contest that “This sentence is false” is a Liar paradox.

The third concerns the work of M. Bouridan. It is indeed true that in the passage I quoted from his Sophismata, he is not talking about the same version of tbe Liar paradox which I discussed. Indeed, he is discussing something much more resembling the original Cretan Paradox, which, again, is not really a paradox. His basic position, however, is that every sentence (or proposition) entails another sentence (or proposition) to the effect that the original sentence (usually named by that sentence’s own quotation) is true. And this is exactly the principle that I employed in my solution. Mr. Bissell may cry that I have misused it, but I have, nonetheless, used it; and I fail to see what is accomplished by insisting otherwise. The matter was brought up only in the interest of giving the solution some historical perspective.