Logos & Episteme

Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013

Paradoxical Assertions: A Reply to Turri

In earlier work, I have argued that the self-referential assertion that “this assertion is improper” is paradoxical for the truth account of assertion, the view on which an assertion is proper if and only if it is true. In a recent paper in this journal, John Turri has suggested a response to the paradox: one might simply deny that in uttering “this assertion is improper” one makes a genuine assertion. In this paper, I argue that this ‘no assertion’ response does not dissolve the paradox in the way Turri suggests.