John Barker

This dissertation uses the Liar paradox to motivate an account of the concept of truth that I call the "inconsistency theory of truth." The Liar paradox is the puzzle that arises when we consider such sentences, known as Liar sentences, that say of themselves that they are not true: whatever truth value we attribute to such a sentence, we seem to be immediately driven to the conclusion that it has the opposite truth value. Examining this puzzle reveals that its source is the following principle, which we may call the disquotational principle: for any sentence 'A', 'A' is true if and only if A. While this principle is very natural, it is also inconsistent, as is shown when the sentence 'A' is a Liar sentence. ;After the introductory Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents some of the technical work on the Liar. Chapter 3 discusses several accounts based on the idea that Liar sentences lack truth values; there I argue that those accounts fail to adequately address a problem known as the strengthened Liar problem. Next, Chapter 4 examines a family of views based on the idea that the formal contradictions derivable by means of the disquotational principle are not really genuine contradictions: according to these views, the appearance of contradiction results from ignoring a contextually determined hidden parameter. I argue that they, too, do not successfully handle the strengthened Liar problem. ;In Chapter 5 I put forth a view based on the idea that the concept of truth itself is inconsistent. Namely, the view I defend is that the linguistic conventions governing the use of the word 'true' commit us to the disquotational schema which, as I said, is inconsistent. I conclude in Chapter 6 by considering some of the implications of believing the inconsistency theory

We examine a distinctive kind of problem for decision theory, involving what we call discontinuity at infinity. Roughly, it arises when an infinite sequence of choices, each apparently sanctioned by plausible principles, converges to a ‘limit choice’ whose utility is much lower than the limit approached by the utilities of the choices in the sequence. We give examples of this phenomenon, focusing on Arntzenius et al.’s Satan’s apple, and give a general characterization of it. In these examples, repeated dominance reasoning (a paradigm of rationality) apparently gives rise to a situation closely analogous to having intransitive preferences (a paradigm of irrationality). Indeed, the agents in these examples are vulnerable to a money pump set-up despite having preferences that exhibit no obvious defect of rationality. We explore several putative solutions to such problems, particularly those that appeal to binding and to deliberative dynamics. We consider the prospects for these solutions, concluding that if they fail, the examples show that money pump arguments are invalid