"Radical Anti-Disquotationalism"
Abstract:
A number of `no-proposition' approaches to the liar paradox find themselves implicitly committed to a moderate form of disquotationalism: the principle that if an utterance of the sentence `P' says anything at all, it says that P (with suitable qualifications). I show that this principle alone is responsible for the revenge paradoxes that plague this view.
I instead propose a view in which there are several closely related language-world relations playing the `semantic expressing' role, none of which is more central to semantic theorizing than any other. I use this thesis about language and the negative result about the disquotational principle to motivate the view that people do say things with utterances of paradoxical sentences, although they do not say the proposition you'd always expect, as articulated with a disquotational principle.