The Yablo paradox. An essay on circularity (Q2873765)

The book is devoted to various considerations connected with the famous Yablo paradox. Recall that the Yablo paradox is an infinite sequence of sentences, each of which asserts the falsity of all of the sentences below it in the list. The book consists of four chapters. Charter 1 provides the philosophical background and technical apparatus needed in next chapters. A history of Yablo paradox is described and some variations of it are constructed and examined. The author considers also the Characterization Problem -- it asks what patterns of sentential reference (circular or not) generate semantic paradoxes. This question is connected with the theory of directed graphs -- so one sees interesting connections between philosophical problems and purely mathematical ones. Chapter 2 is devoted to examining and answering the Circularity Question -- whether or not the Yablo paradox is genuinely non-circular. The answer to this question turns out to be complicated. In Chapter 3 the Generalizability Question is considered: can the Yabloesque pattern be used to generate genuinely non-circular variants of other paradoxes, such as epistemic and set-theoretical paradoxes? In the concluding Chapter 4 a short discussion of the connections between the Yablo paradox and the Curry paradox (from 1942; recall that the Liar paradox is a special case of Curry paradox) is given.