UC Berkeley

Around 600BC, Epimenides, a Cretan apparently discontented with the

honesty of his compatriots, lamented that all Cretans are liars.

Together with a few innocent assumptions, well-entrenched principles

of logic entail that Epimenides' lamentation cannot be true, and yet

cannot be untrue---a flat contradiction. What's gone wrong? In this

dissertation, I argue that the source of the problem has been

misdiagnosed as one about language (especially formal languages). The

problem runs deeper, and stems from the structure of thought itself.

The dissertation proceeds in two main stages. The first stage

(Chapter 2) makes the case that that the intuitions that underlie the

paradoxes come from natural languages, not from formal/mathematical

ones. The Liar and related paradoxes are generally presented as

constraints on the latter. Their lesson, the story goes, is that no

formal theory strong enough to represent the primitive recursive

functions can include a satisfactory truth predicate. I argue that

it's our natural-language competence with the truth predicate that

underlies our understanding of what 'satisfactory' means here, which

shifts the focus of the project to natural language semantics. In this

domain, it's tempting to think (and many have thought) that the

problem with Epimenides' utterance is that it fails to express a

proposition, and this failure explains why we have trouble assigning

it a truth-value. Or, perhaps it does express a proposition, but not

the one that it seems to express. Or, perhaps it can express a

proposition, but which proposition it expresses depends on context. I

argue that all such responses fail, in part because they cannot make

sense of related attitude attributions. I can believe or disbelieve

Epimenides, which wouldn't be possible if his utterance didn't express

the proposition it seems to express.

In the second stage, I argue that such paradoxes arise, not from the

language/thought interface, but rather from thought itself. The first

step in this argument concerns knowledge attributions (Chapter 3),

where I develop and defend a novel solution to the Knower paradox.

Then I move from attitude attributions to attitudes themselves

(Chapter 4). Just as sentential truth and knowledge predicates gives

rise to paradoxical sentences, seemingly innocent combinations of

beliefs and desires give rise to paradoxical propositions---even when

those beliefs and desires are not expressed in language. The

possibility of such pathological combinations isn't accounted for by

any extant theory of mental content, and, I argue, provides support

for a non-classical theory. Finally (Chapter 5) I consider an

objection to these putative combinations of desires. I introduce what

I call /advisory/ desire reports, which seem to exhibit the radically

externalist behavior that the previous chapter rejects. I conclude by

offering reasons to think that the availability of these readings does

not undermine the case for non-classical accounts of attitudes.