Bicontextualism (Q6158340)

The article presents a fully-fledged new theory of truth and paradox, dubbed \textit{Bicontextualism} by its author, aiming to combine virtues of contextualist approaches to truth with instances of ``absolute generality'' about quantifiers interpretation. More in details, the author aims to block semantic paradoxes, like the Liar paradox, by a contextualist interpretation of the paradoxical reasoning while preserving the intuitive, general interpretation of the quantifiers whenever this interpretation does not lead to contradictions. In the author's words: ``The purpose of this article is to show that [...] there is no need to choose between an appealing solution to the paradoxes and an unrestricted interpretation of harmless generalizations: one can simply have both. This is achieved by curtailing absolute generality only when it is strictly necessary [...] The theory developed here is therefore a \textit{bipartite} contextualist semantics (henceforth: \textit{bicontextualism}), in which the ``unproblematic'' sentences are interpreted in an absolutist semantics, while the remaining ones are interpreted in a relativist semantics.'' (p. 96). In Section 2 the contextualist approach to truth and paradox conceived by Charles Parsons and further developed by Michael Glanzberg (referred to as ``orthodox contextualism'' in this article) is outlined, both in its conceptual and philosophical roots and in Glanzberg's formal version based on a Kripkean fixed-point construction. The pros and cons of orthodox contextualism are identified with special emphasis on the ``ban of absolute generality''. The author asks ``how can it be that sentences such as ``everything is self-identical'' or ``everything that is possible is necessarily possible'' do not talk about absolutely everything?'' (p. 101). This is the main issue about truth-theoretic contextualism that Bicontextualism is supposed to overcome. Section 3, the positive and formal core of the proposal, is devoted to a detailed exposition of author's bicontextualist theory of truth. This theory is based, as expected from its name, on two components. The first one is the semantics of the ``unproblematic'' sentences of the object language, a semantics in which the quantifiers are interpreted as ranging over absolutely everything. The formal construction of this component is based on a clever adaptation of Rayo-Uzquiano second-order Tarskian semantics to a Kripkean, non-classical, framework. The outcome of the construction provides a truth definition for the set of the unproblematic sentences of the object language, roughly identifiable with the sentences belonging to the least fixed point of the Kripke construction. As the author warns the reader, his proposal does not offer a principled classification of the sentences of the object language in ``unproblematic'' and ``problematic'' ones. Rather, his theory is built on top of such a classification whose precise identification is, to some extent, a matter of choice: For instance, other consistent non-minimal fixed points could do the job as well. The second component of the bicontextualist theory is a contextualist semantics provided for the problematic sentences which mimics, in the present framework, Glanzberg's contextualist construction. Finally, from the two components, one providing an absolutist semantics for the unproblematic sentences, the other providing a relativist semantics for the problematic ones, notions of consequence and validity for the full object language are carved out. Section 4 argues against the so-called ``Contextualist argument from paradox'', the claim that the Liar paradox provides an argument in favour of the need of a contextualist semantics for all sentences of the object language: Bicontextualism shows that this is not the case and that we can stick to an absolutist, non-contextualist, interpretation of the truth predicate as long as unproblematic sentences are concerned. The last section discusses several objections which can be raised against Bicontextualism as a theory of truth and provides replies to them. This article provides an original, interesting, and transparently articulated formal theory of truth and paradox which sheds new light on older contextualist approaches to the semantics of the truth predicate. The theory of truth is the main focus of the article and the only fully developed application of the Bicontextualist ideas, however, throughout the paper, are also made thorough and illuminating suggestions on how bicontextualism can represent an important ``third way'' within the broader debate between absolutist and relativist approaches to the interpretation of the quantifiers, for instance in fields such as property theory or set theory.