Truth, signification and paradox

Stephen Read

pp. 393-408

in: Theodora Achourioti, Henri Galinon, José Martínez Fernández, Kentaro Fujimoto (eds), Unifying the philosophy of truth, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

Thomas Bradwardine's solution to the semantic paradoxes, presented in his Insolubilia written in Oxford in the early 1320s, turns on two main principles: that a proposition is true only if things are wholly as it signifies; and that signification is closed under consequence. After exploring the background in Walter Burley's account of the signification of propositions, I consider the extent to which Bradwardine's theory is compatible with the compositional principles of the distribution of truth over conjunction, disjunction, negation and the conditional.