Thomas Bradwardine formulated the most ingenious and influential medieval solution of the paradox. He applied Token-based semantics, claiming that what Socrates says (when he says ‘‘Socrates says something false’’) is false, but an outsider uttering the same sentence would speak the truth. The controversial part of Bradwardine’s solution was his claim that when put forward by Socrates, the insoluble sentence signifies and asserts its own truth - and is false for that reason.
After Bradwardine, logicians closely scrutinized the relation of a proposition with the claim that the proposition is true. Do propositions signify their own truth? Is truth a thing such that it can be signified, as Richard Kilvington asks? Bradwardine’s claim was that the truth of the sentence is signified only in special cases like in the insolubles, and Heytesbury developed the solution with the idea that one should never specify what the rejected insoluble sentence exactly signifies. As Heytesbury admits this really amounts only to advice how to deal with the paradox in an actual disputation; it is not a genuine solution. According to Heytesbury, no genuine solution has been found nor is any forthcoming. Interestingly enough, he did not seem to think that this would amount to a major problem to any logical system.
John Buridan extended Bradwardine’s theory by claiming that all propositions assert their own truth, and offered a logically very elaborate solution to the insolubles without some of Bradwardine’ problems, although it remains obscure how exactly the claim that all sentences assert their own truth should be understood. Given the later fame of Buridan’s logic, it is natural that his high-quality solution was well-known later in the Renaissance, finding its way even to Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quijote.
See also: > John Buridan > John Duns Scotus
Thomas Bradwardine > William Heytesbury > William of Ockham
World History
