Truth and paradox: a map of major divide

In my judgment, it would be quite wrong and dangerous from the standpoint of scientific progress to depreciate the importance of this [Liar] and other antinomies, and to treat them as jokes or sophistries. – Alfred Tarski [15] One way of thinking about the significance of the truth-theoretic paradoxes turns on the background conception of truth. (This can in turn be used to evaluate solutions to the paradox.) There are undoubtedly many different ways to carve things up, but I will use one that seems to be both historically well-grounded (or, at least, not historically aberrant) and conceptually useful. In particular, I shall use a two-fold distinction: semantic truth and transparent truth.1 Following Field [3], McGee explicitly notes the (or, at least, a) divide to which I’m gesturing:2 We discern two separate aims one might have in developing a theory of truth. One is to explain the processes by which language is linke