Book Reviews

Abstract

Saving Truth From Paradox is both a detailed survey of approaches to the logic and philosophy of truth-related paradoxes and an exposition and defense of Field's favored approach to these paradoxes. It proceeds in five parts: first, it introduces the paradoxes, and discusses some background issues; second, it presents and criticizes classical approaches to the paradoxes (that is, approaches that hold to full classical logic); third and fourth, it presents, argues for, and considers the consequences of Field's preferred approach to the paradoxes, which involves a weakening of classical logic (in particular, a weakening of the logic of the conditional, along with rejection of excluded middle for some sentences); and fifth, it argues against another sort of non-classical approach to these paradoxes: dialetheism (or, as Field calls it, paraconsistent dialetheism).The book is sizeable (392 pp. of actual text) and chock-full of arguments; there's not space here to mention the half of it, and there are a number of important topics in the book that I'll skip here entirely. 1 Rather, I'll describe each of the four sections briefly in turn, and then offer some brief evaluative remarks.