A Parsons Tale: Tractarian Reflections on a Semantical Paradox

According to Charles Parsons, a liar sentence does not express a proposition at the level of its primary use but does at the level where it is subjected to semantic interpretation. Thus, richer ontological resources unavailable at the level of primary use are available at the level of interpretation. In response to the objection that the correct semantic interpretation of a liar sentence is thereby distorted, I explain how Wittgenstein’s repudiation of “logical objects” and the Tractarian notion of an intrinsically iterative operation show that the liar sentence’s primary use anticipates but does not presuppose the richer interpretive ontology.