Yablo's paradox in second-order languages: consistency and unsatisfiability

The author is concerned with the possibility of representing the so called Yablo's paradox in a formal environment. For this purpose, she distinguishes two senses in which a class \(E\) of expressions can be paradoxical: (1) \(E\) allows us to derive a contradiction from intuitive and previously accepted principles; (2) a consistent assignment of classical truth-values to the all members of \(E\) is not possible; more clearly, if the assumption that some of them are true makes them false and vice-versa, taking into account some intuitive and previously admitted principles. Yablo's paradox, in its informal presentation, involves an infinite countable list of sentences (Yablo's list), which informally yields a paradox in any of the two senses. The question is whether there is a formal representation of Yablo's list that is paradoxical. Because of the nature of the paradox, inquiries as to the possibility of such representation have considered arithmetical contexts strong enough to allow for Goedelization together with (an arithmetical representation of a) truth-predicate. In such contexts, a numerical predicate is introduced (referred as Yablo's predicate) which is such that the attribution of the predicate to a natural number \(n\) is made equivalent to a formal representation in (the aforementioned context) to the \(n\)-member in Yablo's list. In other words, each one of these equivalence states the equivalence of Yablo's predicate as applied to a number \(n\) to the formal representation of the \(n\)-sentence in Yablo's list. Let \(Y\) be the class of all such equivalences. \(Y\) would seem to formally represent Yablo's informal list. As the author points out, within the context of first-order arithmetic, previous results show that \(Y\) is not paradoxical in either of the two senses. The author explores the status of \(Y\) in a second-order environment, in particular, within a certain extension of second-order arithmetic. She shows that no contradiction follows from \(Y\) in such a theory and so that \(Y\) is not paradoxically in the first sense. Contrariwise to this result, she shows that \(Y\) is actually not satisfiable within the theory in question, from which she infers that it is paradoxical in the second sense of paradox.

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