ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the paradoxical effects the reflexivity of language has been thought to cause. It traces the story from the ancient paradox of the Liar, over the medieval doctrines of supposition and imposition, together with their early modern typographical implementation–which eventually consigned them to oblivion, but without rendering them ineffective. The chapter describes the reasoning that led Alfred Tarski to propose a formal solution to the Liar in the 1930s. It examines how Michael Silverstein, who studied under Jakobson, took over meta-theorizing. The scientific study of languages was conditional upon the possibility of collecting linguistic “specimens” in a way that made them comparable to the specimens the naturalists botanized, collected, and arranged systematically. Logicians considered the sentence as a proposition with a truth value, whereas the interest of linguistic scholars was descriptive and rather more abstract. The decisive difference between formalized languages and everyday language is that everyday language has universality and formalized languages do not.
