Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: The Liar; Sentences, statements, and Propositions; The universe of hypersets; RUSSELLIAN PROPOSITIONS AND THE LIAR: Modeling Russellian propositions; Truth of Russellian propositions; Consequences of the Russellian account; Sentences and Russellian propositions; AUSTINIAN PROPOSITIONS AND THE LIAR: Modeling Austinian propositions; Austinian propositions and the world; An Austinian semantics; Relating the Russellian and Austinian accounts; Negation
and denial; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.

Reviews

"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 the two logicians put forward a theory of language that includes explicitly some of the 'contextual parameters' so far left out of logic, but now shown to be crucial to understanding."--London Times
"This delightful book is a self-contained account of the Liar paradox, complete with a formal syntax and proof theory, semantics and proofs of the theorems. It should be of interest to more than just Liar specialists, however, because of the new semantic techniques it introduces."--The Canadian Philosophical Reviews
"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 the two logicians put forward a theory of language that includes explicitly some of the 'contextual parameters' so far left out of logic, but now shown to be crucial to understanding."--London Times
"This delightful book is a self-contained account of the Liar paradox, complete with a formal syntax and proof theory, semantics and proofs of the theorems. It should be of interest to more than just Liar specialists, however, because of the new semantic techniques it introduces."--The Canadian Philosophical Reviews
"Remarkably fruitful, resulting in a theory that is deeply insightful and highly creative, both philosophically and mathematically....An interesting and valuable contribution--The Philosophical Review
"B. & E. have shown great skill and inventiveness which deserves and will surely receive, expert mathematical discussion."--NOUS
"Some interesting work of the Stanford based logicians Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy has thrown considerable light on to [the] vexing problem of [paradoxes]."--The Guardian
"Precise and elegant. . . .The book does what it does superbly. It is very well organized, has just the right amount of detail, and is written in a style that is easy to read, even in very technical contexts. Reading it is genuinely enjoyable." --Journal of Symbolic Logic