A Study On The Solutions To Paradoxes From The Perspective Of The Language Hierarchy Theory

A paradox is a statement that,despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises,leads to an apparently-self-contradictory or logically unacceptable conclusion.For example,"I never tell the truth".Is this sentence true or false? A paradox has an early origin.Epimenides,an ancient Greece philosopher,proposed the Liar Paradox in the 6th century B.C.,and the Chinese logician Gongsun Long proposed the famous paradox A White Horse is not a Horse in about 200 B.C.Paradoxes are a cross-disciplinary subject involving many fields.It is a topic of common concern and discussion in various disciplines such as linguistics,logic,philosophy,and mathematics.A paradox is seemingly a logical contradiction,but in reality it is a dialectical contradiction.It is the contradiction between a subject's knowledge system and the objective world or the contradiction between a certain epistemology or methodology and the objective laws,which is expressed within the knowledge system.The solutions to paradoxes contribute to the improvement of the knowledge system of various disciplines,and the important research value of paradoxes has become the consensus of the academia.Since the discovery of paradoxes,scholars in various fields have analyzed and explored them from different perspectives and proposed many solutions,such as Situation Semantics,Axiomatic Set Theory,Truth-value Gaps,Anti-Foundation Axiom,Context Diagram,etc.However,these solutions have only partially solved some of the paradoxes,and did not give a satisfactory result.For example,Situation Semantics can only solve the semantic paradoxes represented by the Liar Paradox,and it seems powerless in the face of morphological paradoxes.Axiomatic Set Theory can only be used to solve the morphological paradoxes and seems eclipsed when faced with semantic paradoxes.However,the proposition of the Theory of Language Hierarchy provides a new way to solve paradoxes.The Theory of Language Hierarchy originates from the Theory of Type proposedby Russell.As a solution to morphological paradoxes,the Theory of Type provides theoretical support for the solution to paradoxes.Later,Tarski improved Russell's Theory of Type and mentioned that the semantic closure is one of the reasons which can easily lead to paradoxes.Therefore,the Formal Language is proposed,and object language and metalanguage are distinguished.His hierarchy of languages becomes the generally accepted solution to the Liar Paradox,which fully demonstrates the feasibility of the Theory of Language Hierarchy in solving semantic paradoxes.The Theory of Language Hierarchy can also be used to solve the pragmatic paradoxes.Pragmatic paradoxes are separated from semantic paradoxes,so they must have some similarities with the semantic paradoxes,which explains to some extent the reason of using the Theory of Language Hierarchy to explain pragmatic paradoxes.Therefore,this thesis selects the typical paradoxes of the morphological,semantic and pragmatic paradoxes respectively,namely,the Barber Paradox,the Catalogue Paradox,the Liar Paradox,the Grayling Paradox and the Don Quixote Paradox,then uses the Theory of Language Hierarchy to analyze them.This thesis finds that the Barber Paradox,the Catalogue Paradox and other morphological paradoxes are due to the violation of the rule of categorization included in the Theory of Type which belongs to the theory of language hierarchy,that is,there are different types in the proposition thus causing self-reference.As for the Liar Paradox,the Grayling Paradox and other semantic paradoxes,the main reason for them is that they violate the rules of Tarskian Theory of language hierarchy which separates metalanguage and object language,that is,propositions are attempting to state the truth value of their own.The Don Quixote Paradox is the representative of pragmatic paradoxes which involves contextual concepts.It violates the rule of categorization in the Theory of Type too,that is,it is illegal for the low-level languages to state the high-level languages.The application of the Theory of Language Hierarchy to solving these typical paradoxes has proved the feasibility of the theory again and let us deepen the understanding of language itself.In addition,it further clarifies the language level,clarifies the relationship between language and thinking,and provides us with a solid theoretical basis and guidance for the linguistic phenomena and problems in our real life.