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Since the early twentieth century, Moore's paradox has been a challenge to the philosophical understanding of belief, assertion, knowledge, and rationality. This book offers a compelling study of the paradox by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late John Williams.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword - Mitchell Green and Alan Hájek
- 1: Introducing Moore's Paradox
- 2: Moore on Moore's Paradox
- 3: Wittgenstein on Moore's Paradox
- 4: Some Salient Approaches to Omissive and Commissive Moore-Paradoxical Assertion
- 5: Expressing Belief and Knowledge, Assertion, and the Expressivist Approach
- 6: An Account of Belief
- 7: Some Salient Approaches to Moore's Paradox in Belief
- 8: The Knowledge Version in Belief
- 9: The Knowledge Version in Assertion
- 10: The Priority of Belief Thesis and the Incredibility of the Assertor
- 11: Conscious Belief
- 12: The Self-falsification Account in Belief and Assertion, Rationality, and Absurdity
- 13: Eliminativism, Dialethism and Moore's Paradox
- 14: Moore's Paradox and Sorensen's Iterated Cases
- 15: The Justification Approach to Moore-Paradoxical Belief
- 16: Defining Moore-paradoxicality: The Preface Paradox and Rational Inconsistent Belief
- 17: Moore's Paradox and Desire
- 18: Further Work
- Bibliography
About the author
John Williams arrived in Singapore in the early 1980s from the University of Hull, where he obtained his Ph.D. under Alan R. White. He was thereafter largely based in Singapore, first as Lecturer at the National University of Singapore and subsequently as Associate Professor at Singapore Management University. Interspersed with these appointments were brief stints in Jamaica, as Head of Philosophy at the University of the West Indies; South Africa, as Visiting Fellow at Rhodes University; and, most recently, the Republic of Kazakhstan, as Professor at Nazarbayev University. He passed away in August 2019 in Singapore.
Summary
A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with Moore's paradox by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late John Williams. The book offers a comprehensive account of Moore's paradox in thought and speech, both in its comissive and omissive forms. Williams argues that Moorean absurdity comes in degrees, and shows that contrary to one tradition in the literature on Moore's Paradox, we cannot explain Moorean absurdity in speech in terms of Moorean absurdity in thought, but must account for each form of absurdity in its own terms. Williams also explores the extent to which Moore's paradox may arise for attitudes other than belief, such as desire. Written with Williams' trademark clarity and wit, the book is packed with arguments bearing on a wide range of topics in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.
