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Liar paradox
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===Bhartrhari's perspectivism=== The Indian grammarian-philosopher [[Bhartrhari]] (late fifth century AD) dealt with paradoxes such as the liar in a section of one of the chapters of his magnum opus the Vākyapadīya.{{Citation needed|date=May 2022}} Bhartrhari's solution fits into his general approach to language, thought and reality, which has been characterized by some as "relativistic", "non-committal" or "perspectivistic".<ref>Jan E. M. Houben, "Bhartrhari's Perspectivism (1)" in ''Beyond Orientalism'' ed. by Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz, Amsterdam – Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997; [[Madeleine Biardeau]] recognized that Bhartrhari "wants to rise at once above all controversies by showing the conditions of possibility of any system of interpretation, rather than to prove the truth of a certain particular system" (Théorie de la connaissance et philosophie de la parole dans le brahmanisme classique, Paris – La Haye: Mouton, 1964, p. 263)</ref> With regard to the liar paradox (''sarvam mithyā bravīmi'' "everything I am saying is false") Bhartrhari identifies a hidden parameter that can change unproblematic situations in daily communication into a stubborn paradox. Bhartrhari's solution can be understood in terms of the solution proposed in 1992 by Julian Roberts: "Paradoxes consume themselves. But we can keep apart the warring sides of the contradiction by the simple expedient of temporal contextualisation: what is 'true' with respect to one point in time need not be so in another ... The overall force of the 'Austinian' argument is not merely that 'things change', but that rationality is essentially temporal in that we need time in order to reconcile and manage what would otherwise be mutually destructive states."<ref>Roberts, Julian. 1992. ''The Logic of Reflection. German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century''. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p. 43.</ref> According to Robert's suggestion, it is the factor "time" which allows us to reconcile the separated "parts of the world" that play a crucial role in the solution of Barwise and Etchemendy.<ref name="Barwise1989"/>{{rp|188}} The capacity of time to prevent a direct confrontation of the two "parts of the world" is here external to the "liar". In the light of Bhartrhari's analysis, however, the extension in time that separates two perspectives on the world or two "parts of the world" – the part before and the part after the function accomplishes its task – is inherent in any "function": also the function to signify which underlies each statement, including the "liar".<ref name=JEMH2001/>{{Unclear inline|date=May 2022}} The unsolvable paradox – a situation in which we have either contradiction (''virodha'') or infinite regress (''anavasthā'') – arises, in case of the liar and other paradoxes such as the unsignifiability paradox ([[Bhartrhari's paradox]]), when abstraction is made from this function (''vyāpāra'') and its extension in time, by accepting a simultaneous, opposite function (''apara vyāpāra'') undoing the previous one.
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