A New Solution to Cartwright's Paradox

Abstract

The paper offers a new solution to a paradox introduced by Richard Cartwright and discussed by Kaplan. The paradox is, in a nutshell, as follows. Suppose that we name with '(1)' the statement 'the last word of (1) is obscene', and with '(2)' the statement 'the last word of (1) is obscene'. It seems that, although under these stipulations (1) = (2), (2) has a modal property which (1) lacks, to wit: it can be turned into a truth by quoting its last word. But this seems to contradict Leibniz' Law. In offering a solution which differs somehow from the one favored by Kaplan, I put to use proposals on the semantics of indexicals and proper names I have defended in previous works. To the extent that the solution improves on previous ones, it provides partial confirmation for the semantic proposals on which it relies.