Malfunctionalism and the Liar Paradox: Bad Expressions of Good Content

Abstract Self-denying utterances like ‘What I am saying is false’ are paradoxical because a contradiction follows whether the utterance is true or not. This is the ancient Liar paradox. A popular strategy for solving the paradox, here christened malfunctionism with prominent supporters including Kripke and Mackie, is to say that the relevant utterances malfunction and fail to say what they appear to say. But a credible account of how the failure might occur has so far proved elusive. The right words appear in grammatical order with appropriate speaker intentions, so what could possibly stand in the way of a successful statement? A recent development in the debate sheds new light on this question. It has transpired that malfunctionalism should regard the paradoxical utterances as bad expressions of good content: the propositions do exist, they just can’t be expressed by those utterances. Any malfunctioning must therefore pertain to the link between utterance and proposition. The headline claim of this paper is that a closer look at this link in the Liar case does indeed reveal an anomaly. On standard views, an utterance is connected to the proposition it expresses by way of an asymmetrical truth-dependence, such that the truth-value of the utterance is determined by whether the proposition obtains. But in the Liar case, this would require a truth-value to asymmetrically depend on itself, which is incoherent. Hence the asymmetrical truth-dependence breaks down, and malfunctionalism is vindicated.