Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

There is a kind of argument, a paradigmatic example of which is what Lewis (1984) calls `Putnam's paradox', which has as its conclusion that everything we say is, when interpreted correctly, true. This conclusion is taken by almost everyone to be disastrous, so inasmuch as its premises are plausible and the argument is valid, we have a paradox on our hands. The most common response to the argument, developed by Lewis himself and others, is to avoid the conclusion by appealing to constraints on interpretation that do not depend on our psychology or conventions, either individually or collectively; some things are just objectively more eligible to be represented in our thought and talk. In this paper I defend a different response to the paradox and outline an underappreciated alternative conception of interpretation indicated by this different response.