The Semantic Paradoxes: critical edition and translation of Bradwardine's 'Insolubilia'

哲学逻辑中最具挑战性的问题之一是如何解释不被逻辑悖论，特别是语义悖论，如说谎者悖论所破坏的真理和意义。这一悖论源于对这样一句话的思考：“这句话是假的”，只有当它是假的时候，它才看起来是真的，反之亦然。在过去的一百年里，人们对这些悖论给予了很大的关注，但没有达成令人满意的一致意见，没有找到一种不会使治疗比疾病更糟糕的解决方案。例如，塔尔斯基在20世纪30年代的解决方案似乎涉及放弃任何为自然语言定义真的尝试，克里普克在1975年的提议不仅要求放弃二价性(结论是说谎者句子既不是真的也不是假的)，而且还要求认识到这一事实不能被一致地陈述。塔尔斯基和克里普克都采用了客体语言(定义真值)和元语言(定义客体语言的真值)的层次结构，尽管在克里普克的例子中，只有在说谎者句子是悖论的、既不是真也不是假的情况下，才需要这样做。中世纪的语义悖论也得到了更多的关注，特别是在13世纪和14世纪。约翰·布里丹在1350年左右提出的理论在过去的60年里得到了广泛的讨论，乔治·休斯在1982年出版的一本版本、翻译和评论中对其进行了最好的处理。但布里丹的提议不仅存在几个问题，而且在13世纪20年代托马斯·布拉德沃丁(Thomas Bradwardine)在牛津撰写的关于悖论的讨论中，核心思想也被预见到了。这部作品最初是在1970年编辑的，但只有拉丁文版本，测试只基于一份手稿，尽管当时编辑还知道另外三份手稿。我们现在知道至少有13个MS。在以前的出版物中，1认为Bradwardine的解决方案不容易受到反对意见的影响，这些反对意见破坏了Buridan的解决方案，并且确实提出了Bradwardine的解决方案值得当代研究和阐述。我还确定了几个段落，可以通过咨询其他MS来删除现有的文本。我的目标是建立所有13个MS的拉丁文文本的批判性版本，并提供作品的英文翻译，以便将其带给更广泛的研究人员和学生。我的模式将是休斯对布里丹类似文本的处理。像布里丹的论文一样，布拉德沃丁的论文是一部文字精美的作品，经过严密的论证和有力的呈现。在前几章中，布拉德沃丁考虑了他那个时代的主流学说，特别是那些声称这样的句子什么都不能说的“无效者”和“限制者”的学说，他们说任何表达都不能指它是整体的一部分。他对这些观点不屑一顾，这些观点在当代哲学中有着明显的相似之处。然后，他提出了他自己的解决方案所依赖的各种假设，并清楚地展示了如何解决悖论，然后将解决方案扩展到其他悖论或“无法解决的”情况，如著名的柏拉图/亚里士多德悖论，其中柏拉图说亚里士多德说的是真的，而亚里士多德说柏拉图说的是假的。

One of the most challenging problems in philosophical logic is to give an account of truth and meaning which is not undermined by the logical paradoxes, in particular, the semantic paradoxes such as the Liar paradox. This paradox arises from considering such a sentence as 'This sentence is false', which seems to be true just when it is false and vice versa. Much attention has been given to these paradoxes throughout the past hundred years, without satisfactory agreement on a solution which does not make the cure worse than the disease. For example, Tarski's solution in the 1930s seemed to involve abandoning any attempt to define truth for natural languages, and Kripke's proposal in 1975 required not only the abandonment of Bivalence (concluding that the Liar sentence is neither true nor false) but also recognition that this fact could not be consistently stated. Both Tarski and Kripke resort to a hierarchy of object language (for which truth is defined) and metalanguage {defining truth for the object language), albeit in Kripke's case this is needed only for claims such as that the Liar sentence is paradoxical and neither true nor false.Much attention was also paid to the semantic paradoxes in the Middle Ages, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The theory presented by John Buridan around 1350 has been extensively discussed in the past sixty years, and was given its best treatment by George Hughes in an edition, translation and commentary published in 1982. But not only are there several problems with Buridan's proposal, but the central idea was anticipated in the discussion of the paradoxes by Thomas Bradwardine, writing in Oxford in the 1320s. This work was first edited in 1970, but exists only in Latin, and the test is based on just one manuscript, though the editor even then knew of three others. We now know of at least thirteen mss. In earlier publications, 1 have argued that Bradwardine's solution is not vulnerable to the objections which undermine Buridan's, and indeed, have presented Bradwardine's solution as worthy of contemporary examination and elaboration. I have also identified several passages where the existing text can be removed by consulting other mss.My aim is to establish a critical edition of the Latin text from all thirteen mss., and to provide an English translation of the work, in order to bring it to a wider audience of both researchers and students. My model would be Hughes's treatment of Buridan's similar text. Like Buridan's, Bradwardine's treatise is a beautifully written work, closely argued and powerfully presented. In the first few chapters, Bradwardine considers the prevailing doctrines in his own day, notably those of the ''nullifiers', who claim that such sentences say nothing, and the "restrictors", who say that no expression can refer tothe whole of which it is part. He dismisses these views incisively, views which have obvious parallels in contemporary philosophy. He then sets out the various assumptions on which his own solution depends, and shows clearly how the paradox is solved, before extending the solution to other paradoxical or "insoluble" cases such as the famous Plato/Aristotle paradox, where Plato says that what Aristotle says is true while Aristotle says that what Plato says is false.