• Dialetheism and On Escaping the Strengthened Liar’s Paradox: Gap, Glut, Revenge and Super-Liar’s

In this essay, we explored the liar’s sentence and how gap and glut theories attempt to solve the paradox. We also saw how each of these theories suffer from revenge problems and we then focused on evaluating the available dialetheic paths when dealing with strengthened paradoxes like SL. Firstly, we saw how we could tentatively bring truth gaps back but that this goes against the dialetheist motivations and that it would be better to avoid the dialetheist baggage by adopting this strategy from an earlier stage. Secondly, we observed how the dialetheist finds themselves in a dilemma: having crippling expressive limitations or allowing a super liar’s revenge. Finally, we explored a notion of absolute contradiction which defines an operator “_“ in dialetheist theories, but here again, the evidence points towards revenge looming around the corner.

The options explored in this essay seem, at least in the first instance, to be the different available strategies that the dialetheist could adopt, and they all have considerable problems. As it stands the dialetheist does not have any satisfying way of answering the challenge posed by the strengthened liar’s and escape the semantic paradox headache that it was designed to avoid.