The Liar Paradox as a Conflict of Logical Acts: The Sentence Collapse Hypothesis

The Liar Paradox and its strengthened version are traditionally viewed as a problem of truth. This paper puts forward an alternative hypothesis: the source of the paradox is a structural conflict within the sentence itself. The subject and the act of truth-value ascription compete for a single resource—the completeness of the proposition. This competition is unresolvable: the sentence never reaches the logical stage at which the question of truth can be raised. The paradox is resolved without prohibiting self-reference, without a hierarchy of languages, and without introducing extra truth values.