Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems by Charles E. Lindblom

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I began reading this book sometime around 1978. I finished it today. I don’t remember why I stopped reading it the first time. Through the years, I thought about picking it up again but never did. Until a few weeks ago.

Charles Lindblom (1917-2018) was a Yale professor of politics and economics. In Politics and Markets, he categorizes and analyzes the different ways nations are organized, concentrating on the relative roles played by governments and markets in countries ranging from the United States and United Kingdom on one end of the continuum to China, the Soviet Union and Cuba on the other. Since the book was published in 1977, he pays a lot more attention to communism than he would do today.

Reading this book is strange at times. Lindblom is describing something in great detail that you might feel you already know. Don’t we all understand how governments and markets work? Well, not as well as Prof. Lindblom did. (Still, if you had to teach relatively advanced students from another planet about the way governments and businesses operate on Earth, starting from scratch, Politics and Markets would make a very good text.)

The book left me with two main thoughts. The first is hardly a revelation: all countries, even Cuba circa 1976, are hybrids. All countries have governments, of course. But all of them also employ so-called “free markets” as well. No society is totally planned by the government, for good reasons. Even the most pervasive governments use markets for various purposes, as when money is paid to acquire consumer goods or to attract employees to better-paying jobs.

This makes China’s transition from a communist country to a leading participant in world markets easier to understand. The Chinese have retained the one-party control of communism while doing a better job at capitalism than many of their capitalist competitors. The issue is always what mechanisms (laws, regulations, civic education) should be used to insure that businesses are successful while serving the health and welfare of society. Neither total government control of the economy nor total freedom for business would make sense. 

The other thought is more surprising. We often hear that democracy and capitalism work well together. They say it’s something to do with freedom. Yet there is a serious conflict between democracy and big business. Lindblom explains how the people who run businesses must be encouraged or induced to keep the economy functioning. If government officials interfere too much (from the business perspective), companies can stop producing sufficient amounts of the goods and services the rest of us need, at prices we can afford. They can also decide to pay us to little to live on or employ too few of us. If business people don’t produce enough or raise prices too much, there’s inflation; if they don’t pay us enough or hire enough of us, there’s deflation.. 

Because big corporations are so important to the economic life of a nation, the unelected owners and managers of these firms wield great power. From the book’s final paragraphs:

. . . It is possible that the rise of the corporation has offset or more than offset the decline of class as an instrument of indoctrination. That the corporation is a powerful instrument for indoctrination we have documented earlier. That it has risen to prominence in society as class lines have muted is clear enough. That it creates a new core of wealth and power for a newly constructed upper class, as well an an overpowering loud voice, is also reasonably clear. 

The executive of the large corporation, is on, on many counts, the contemporary counterpart to the landed gentry of an earlier era, his voice amplified by the technology of mass communication. A single corporate voice on television, it has been estimated, can reach more minds in one evening than were reached from all the platforms of all the world’s meetings in the course of several centuries preceding broadcasting. More than class, the major specific institutional barrier to fuller democracy may therefore be the autonomy of the private corporation.

It has been a curious feature of democratic thought that it has not faced up to the private corporation as a peculiar organization in an ostensible democracy. Enormously large, rich in resources, the big corporations, we have seen, command more resources than do most government units. They can also, over a broad range, insist that government meet their demands, even if these demands run counter to those of citizens expressed through their polyarchal [rule by the many] controls. Moreover, they do not disqualify themselves from playing the partisan role of a citizen — for the corporation is legally a person. And they exercise unusual veto powers. They are on all these counts disproportionately powerful, we have seen. The large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit.

Lindblom doesn’t offer a solution, although he thinks more corporations might be treated like defense contractors or public utilities. The government would guarantee their profits while exerting significant control over their operations.

And with that, Charles Lindblom’s Politics and Markets can safely return to a bookcase to sit quietly for another 40 years. That’s if it escapes the recycling bin, or a natural disaster, since even excellent books don’t live forever.

All-American Terrorists

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The F.B.I. announced the arrest of 13 members of our species who were planning to make America great again. Here are five of them:

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From The New York Times:

Storming the State Capitol. Instigating a civil war. Abducting a sitting governor ahead of the presidential election.

Those were among the plots described by federal and state officials in Michigan on Thursday as they announced terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges against 13 men. At least six of them, officials said, had hatched a detailed plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has become a focal point of anti-government views and anger over coronavirus control measures.

The group that planned the kidnapping met repeatedly over the summer for firearms training and combat drills and practiced building explosives, the F.B.I. said; members also gathered several times to discuss the mission, including in [a basement] accessible only through a “trap door” under a rug.

The men spied on Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home in August and September, even looking under a highway bridge for places they could place and detonate a bomb to distract the authorities, the F.B.I. said. They indicated that they wanted to take Ms. Whitmer hostage before the election in November, and one man said they should take her to a “secure location” in Wisconsin for a “trial,” Richard J. Trask II, an F.B.I. special agent, said in the criminal complaint.

Mr. Trask said that one of those arrested had bought a Taser for the mission last week and that the men had been planning to buy explosives on Wednesday. Court records indicated that at least five of the men had been arrested on Wednesday in Ypsilanti, Mich.; it was not immediately clear if the sixth man had been taken into custody. . . .

The F.B.I. said a leader in the kidnapping plot had reached out to members of an unnamed anti-government group for help, and the state charged an additional seven men, all from Michigan, with providing material support for terrorist activities, being members of a gang and using firearms while committing felonies.

The seven men were said to be affiliated with an extremist group known as the Wolverine Watchmen, and the state’s attorney general accused them of collecting addresses of police officers in order to target them, threatening to start a civil war “leading to societal collapse” and planning to kidnap the governor and other government officials.

The seven men were charged with state crimes, which carry penalties of two to 20 years in prison.

Ms. Whitmer and Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, tied the extremist plot to comments from President Txxxx and his refusal at times . . . to condemn white supremacists and violent right-wing groups. . . . Ms. Whitmer said extremists had “heard the president’s words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry — as a call to action.”

. . . the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, said in September that the most pressing threats facing the nation were from anti-government and white supremacist groups, who . . . have carried out the most lethal domestic attacks in recent years.

The F.B.I. investigation of the kidnapping plot began early this year, according to an affidavit, after a social media discussion of violent government overthrow. The F.B.I. used confidential informants, undercover agents and intercepted messages to monitor the group. . . . The six men were charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, which can carry a life sentence.

The authorities said that [two of the men] had decided to “unite others” to “take violent action” against state governments that they thought were violating the Constitution . . . . The F.B.I. said [one] had talked of storming the Michigan Statehouse with 200 men and trying Ms. Whitmer for treason. . . .

Ms. Whitmer has been the subject of criticism from right-wing protesters for measures she imposed to try to control the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected about 146,000 Michigan residents and killed about 7,200.

In April, thousands of people gathered at the State Capitol to protest the executive orders she issued shutting down most of the state. Mr. Txxxx openly encouraged such protests, tweeting, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

. . . In May, a man was charged with threatening to kill Ms. Whitmer and Ms. Nessel. And the protests at the Capitol in Lansing featured some signs with swastikas, Confederate flags and demonstrators who advocated for violence against Ms. Whitmer, including one man who carried a doll with brown hair hanging from a noose. Many in the crowd carried semiautomatic weapons, leading some Democrats in the Legislature to call for a ban on guns in the Capitol.

Republicans in the Legislature sued Ms. Whitmer in May over the executive orders, and last week opponents of her lockdown filed petitions with more than 500,000 signatures to repeal a 1945 law that gives governors authority to declare emergencies during times of a public health crisis. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled last week that the law, which Ms. Whitmer had cited, was unconstitutional [deciding it conflicts with another Michigan law regarding emergency declarations]. . . .

The alleged plot in Michigan was infused with elements that have been the focus of anti-government extremists for years, said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, such as accusing government officials of tyranny.

Most of all, Ms. MacNab said, they want their acts to serve as examples — to inspire others to carry out similar attacks.

“Starting a revolution is a common thread in the overall anti-government extremist movement,” Ms. MacNab said.

Homeland Security analysts have warned in recent days of potential attacks from extremists seeking to retaliate against government-ordered social distancing measures and closures. . .

The F.B.I. said it had monitored the kidnapping plot throughout the summer as the target narrowed to the governor’s personal vacation home. The group discussed the governor in vulgar terms and called her a “tyrant.”

“Have one person go to her house. Knock on the door and when she answers it just cap her,” one of the men said in an encrypted group chat, according to the F.B.I. . . .

“I just wanna make the world glow, dude,” the affidavit quoted [one of the men] as saying in a profanity-laced tirade. “We’re gonna topple it all . . . “

As Different Kinds of Capitalism Take Over the World

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The New York Review of Books comes in the mail every few weeks. I’ve never been tempted to switch to a digital subscription, partly out of habit, but also because the version on paper is good for reading and also good for looking at. For one thing, I’d miss the book advertisements, which don’t appear online. A yearly subscription to the paper edition is kind of expensive, but we still have libraries and you can still buy a single copy (although those are kind of expensive too). What I didn’t know until just now is that in addition to a regular digital subscription, you can get a Kindle subscription for the low, low price of $3.49 a month (which translates to $2.09 per issue). The world’s richest capitalist is a money grubber (even now!) who treats some of his employees very badly, but he’s made life easier at times.

I’d provide a link to an excellent article in the September 24th NYRB but, except for the latest edition, all of their articles are behind a paywall. The article is “Can We Fix Capitalism?” by Robert Kuttner. Here’s a bit of the article, which is worth reading all the way through:

For enthusiasts of capitalism, democracy and the market are said to be handmaidens. Both depend on the rule of law. Both express aspects of liberty, prizing opportunity and mobility. During the era of classical liberalism, which began in the late eighteenth century, free commerce and political freedom advanced in tandem. Monarchies gave way to republican rule; open markets replaced royal monopolies and inherited privileges. For about a century the franchise gradually expanded, and markets became the primary mode of commerce. The brand of democratic capitalism that emerged in the West after World War II included not just those earlier hallmarks but such liberal values as tolerance, compromise, and enlarged civic participation, as well as regulatory and social welfare policies to buffer the less savory tendencies of markets. Modern capitalism reflected a grand social bargain.

When communism collapsed in 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall was heralded as ushering in a golden age in which liberal capitalism would be triumphant. Needless to say, things haven’t worked out quite as expected. The social compromises of the postwar welfare state have given way to more primitive forms of capitalism that in turn invite angry reactions by the citizenry. Demagogues have channeled this anger. Today, some form of capitalism is ascendant nearly everywhere. But liberal democracy is in big trouble.

Instead of creating a new golden age, corrupted capitalism has produced alliances between autocrats and oligarchs, epitomized by the regimes of Putin and Txxxx, who both reinforce societies that were already becoming less liberal and more unequal. This is the pattern not just in countries with weak or nonexistent democratic traditions, notably Russia and China, but in the very heartland of liberal democracy, the United States of America. Contrary to standard assumptions about liberalism, autocratic capitalism also coexists and interacts with enlarged global trade, making it harder to defend living standards in democratic nations that once protected their workers and citizens by regulating markets.

In a cycle of reactivity, ordinary people turn not to social democracy—now at its weakest point since World War II—but to the vicarious and counterfeit satisfactions of extreme nationalism. That in turn permits autocrats to pose as populist champions of a mystical People, diverting attention from the economy’s concentrated wealth and rigged rules. This unexpected twist in the fraught relationship between democracy and capitalism is the signal event in the political economy of our age.

In Capitalism, Alone, the economist Branko Milanovic tries to make sense of what has occurred and what the future holds. . . . Milanovic chronicles the rise of authoritarian capitalism, both in nations that once epitomized liberal capitalism such as the US and in countries like China, which are partly capitalist but show no signs of turning liberal. Until recently, as the China scholar James Mann has observed, the widespread hope was that as China’s economy became more capitalistic, the country would become “more like us.” The reality is that we are becoming more like China. . . . 

Milanovic’s first section, on liberal capitalism, offers a smart assessment of how it once worked and why it is now under siege. In the heyday of managed, meritocratic capitalism, societies relied on several mechanisms to equalize income and opportunity. For Milanovic, “strong trade unions, mass education, high taxes, and large government transfers” were essential components. All of these have lost traction as capital has gained more power relative to labor, and globalization has spawned competition to cut taxes, slash wages, and reduce regulation. . . . 

Liberal capitalism, Milanovic concludes, is “reneging on some crucial aspects of [its] implicit value system” via “the creation of a self-perpetuating upper class.” That trend in turn threatens liberal capitalism’s own survival, and makes it less appealing as a model for the rest of the world. . . . 

While Chinese political capitalism is an economic triumph, Russia’s is not. Post-Soviet Russia is basically a petro-state. Its economy has largely failed to generate consumer export industries, the mainstay of China’s success. Vladimir Putin has an understanding with the oligarchs; they can pursue corrupt enterprises as long as they throw some graft his way and don’t make trouble for the regime. His net worth is said to be around $200 billion. In a taxonomy of capitalisms, it would have been interesting to have Milanovic’s insights on why the Russian brand of autocratic capitalism fails while China’s succeeds. . . . 

The most provocative part of the book is the section in which Milanovic addresses a dilemma with no intuitively correct answer: Should we look at the issue of economic inequality as a national or a global question? Most economists and concerned citizens assess it nationally. As Americans, we are troubled that our country has become one of economic extremes. Milanovic insists that the proper lens is global. Income inequality has increased within nearly every nation for the past three decades, substantially driven by globalization. Yet the rise of China, which lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, has rendered the world as a whole more equal.

This cheerful formulation, however, sidesteps the issue of how globalization promotes inequality within nations and thus undermines national democracy. The increased entry of low-wage goods renders high-wage manufacturing labor in wealthy countries uncompetitive. Meanwhile, the greater license for capital in a globalized world promotes deregulation, corruption, the hiding of assets, and exorbitant income for capitalists. The result: greater disparities of income and wealth at both the top and the bottom, and unequal power to make the rules—producing yet more inequality. The consequences for political democracy are grave. As Louis Brandeis was said to have remarked, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Milanovic tends to dismiss the effect of globalization on wealth concentration and democracy within countries in favor of celebrating the rise of China as a gain for global equality. China’s rising GDP, as he points out, has been responsible for about 95 percent of the global reduction in extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank. Milanovic quotes the egalitarian philosopher John Rawls, who argues that if we didn’t know in advance where we would stand in the income hierarchy, we’d favor an income distribution far more equal than the one we have. Why, Milanovic demands, should that principle be applied nationally and not globally? As Rawlsians, don’t we care about the world’s poor and not just the poor in our own land? It’s a good question.

One persuasive rejoinder has been offered by the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. Nations, he points out, are where policies are made. If we are going to have a socially tolerable income distribution within the polity, that project must be pursued nationally, since there is no global government and no global citizenship. There is an inevitable tension, Rodrik writes, between the policy sovereignty of democratic nations and the logic of globalization. He is emphatic on what should take priority: “Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way.”

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A Day in October 2020

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Below is part of the newsletter produced by Crooked Media for October 6, 2020. They produce one every weekday. It’s an excellent way to keep up with the news, if you can stand keeping up with the news. You can subscribe here (it’s free.)

Many of us questioned President Txxxx’s coronavirus-ridden return to the White House, but now that he’s threatened to travel to Miami, reverted to spreading months-old disinformation about COVID-19, and sent the economy into a nosedive, it seems clear the man’s judgement is as sound as ever.

  • Within moments of arriving home, a highly-medicated Dxxxx Txxxx horrified doctors (and also, everyone) by dramatically removing his mask and releasing a bizarre propaganda video that asserted he contracted coronavirus as an act of…leadership. Today Txxxx proved how much he’s learned from his firsthand leadership experience by spreading the same false comparison between coronavirus and influenza he first promoted 210,000 deaths ago. Social media companies censored those posts, leading Txxxx to cryptically call for the destruction of the internet. He’s back, baby!
  • Not content to shed coronavirus around the hard-hit, poorly-ventilated West Wing, Dxxxx Txxxx has announced his intention to take this infectious show on the road. Txxxx’s lying doctor Sean Conley put out a statement that the president, who was visibly gasping for air upon his return to the White House on Monday, today “reports no symptoms,” and the miraculously recovered 74-year-old tweeted that he’s “looking forward to the debate on the evening of Thursday, October 15th in Miami. It will be great!” That townhall-style debate would be just two weeks after Txxxx (purportedly) began experiencing symptoms, and it is beyond insane for him to consider attending it in person.
  • On Monday Conley suggested that Txxxx’s tweets served as a useful gauge of his mental fitness. We would be interested to know what the good doctor thinks about these ones, in which President Deals shut down all hopes of further coronavirus stimulus until after the election and immediately tanked the stock market. Incidentally, here’s a new poll that found 74 percent of voters think the Senate should prioritize coronavirus relief over confirming Amy Coney Barrett. More Coronavirus, Worse Economy: It’s a bold closing argument from Team Txxxx.

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Meanwhile, as more people in the White House’s orbit fall ill, the administration has worked systematically to make sure we never learn when Txxxx last tested negative, or how many people contracted the virus from him or people at his superspreading events.

  • Stephen Miller has it. Nearly all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in quarantine after a Coast Guard admiral tested positive. Txxxx’s Coast Guard aide Jayna McCarron has coronavirus, as does one of his active-duty military valets and a third press office aide. New York Times reporter Michael Shear said his wife has now tested positive: “The collateral damage is going to be pretty significant, I think.” White House employees are rightly scared and angry; one source told Axios, “It’s insane that he would return to the White House and jeopardize his staff’s health when we are still learning of new cases among senior staff. This place is a cesspool.”
  • Txxxx’s recklessness and refusal to conduct contact tracing have consequences beyond the White House grounds. Washington, DC, reported 105 new coronavirus cases on Monday, the city’s highest one-day spike since June. That spike may not be a function of the Rose Garden Misadventure alone. John Hagee, a megachurch pastor and Txxxx advisor, has tested positive; he wasn’t present at the Amy Coney Barrett nomination event, but he did attend a September 15 White House event along with hundreds of people who were largely flouting safety measures. 

Our new reality is almost too surreal to fathom: The president and his allies are not only neglecting their responsibility to bring the pandemic under control, they’re now actively and knowingly spreading a deadly virus themselves. What a good time to don the hazmat suit of democracy and escort them out.

Unquote.

Next they have sections called What Else?, Be Smarter and Is That Hope? Today they ended with:

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Philosophy Talk

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A philosophy professor named Tim Sommers and I had an exchange at Three Quarks Daily about the Liar’s Paradox (the president wasn’t mentioned):

TS: There’s something wrong with the sentence, “This sentence is false.” Is it true or false? Well, if it’s true, then it’s false. But then if it’s false, it’s true. And so on. This is the simplest, most straightforward version of the “Liar’s Paradox”. It’s at least two thousand five hundred years old and well-known enough that you can buy the t-shirt on Amazon.com.

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I’ve been thinking about the “Liar’s Paradox” lately, because I’m teaching an “Introduction to Philosophy” class on paradoxes (and writing a book) called “Life’s a Puzzle: Philosophy’s Greatest Paradoxes, Thought-Experiments, Counter-Intuitive Arguments, and Counter-Examples from AI to Zeno”. It starts with the “Liar’s Paradox” because it’s one of the oldest and most well-known, but also simplest and most daunting, of philosophical paradoxes. Some people think that while “puzzle” cases in philosophy are fun and showy, they are not where the real action is. I think every real philosophical puzzle is a window onto a mystery. And proposed solutions to that mystery are samples of the variety and possibilities of philosophy.

So, let’s start with this. Why is it called the “Liar’s Paradox”? Let’s go to the Christian Bible for that one, specifically, “St. Paul’s Letter to Titus” (Ch. 1, verses 12-14)

“They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach – and that for the sake of filthy lucre.12 One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’13 This statement is true.14”

Verse 12 has philosophers dead to rights. We are disrupting whole households, teaching things we ought not to teach and – speaking for myself at least – it’s all about the filthy lucre (hence, the book). But verse 13 is what we want here. It has “Cretan’s own prophet” saying “Cretans are always liars.” Now, if that just means that all Cretans lie a lot, but not all the time, there’s no problem. But if it means that Cretans are always lying whenever they speak, given that this is asserted by a Cretan (read: liar), we have a paradox. This then is the primordial, liar’s version of the “Liar’s Paradox”. If that’s unclear you can simplify the liar’s version down to: “I am lying right now.”

By the way, “Crete’s own prophet” was “Epimenides of Crete”. Crete is the largest of the Greek islands, only 99 miles from the mainland, but (at that time) culturally distinct. It was the home of the Minoans. You might think you’ve never heard of the Minoans, but you have. They built a very famous labyrinth . . . 

What should we say about, “This sentence is false”? What if we said not every sentence has to be true or false and leave it at that? But “This sentence is not true” works just as well. Or rather works just as paradoxically. It’s true, if it’s not true. If it’s not true, it’s true. Even if we say not every sentence has to be true or false, we can’t have sentences that are both true and not true. That’s a straight-up contradiction. . . .

There’s . . . something called the Prior solution to the “Liar’s Paradox”, not because it’s prior to anything, but just because [it was formulated by] Arthur Prior. Prior says every sentence already implicitly implies its own truth. So, “This is fun”, really says “This sentence is true and this is fun.” Apply that to “This sentence is false” and you get “This sentence is true and this sentence is false”, which asserts a contradiction and so is just false now and not paradoxical. Voila! Problem solved.

Except, did you ever see the episode of “Rick and Morty” where Morty said, “What Rick just said is false”, and Rick said, “What Morty just said is true”? That’s the two-sentence version of the “Liar’s Paradox”. . . . Prior’s solution can’t help us here. (1) This sentence is true and the next sentence is false. (2) This sentence is true and the previous sentence is true. The paradox does not go away.

Maybe, what’s wrong with “This sentence is false” is that it’s self-referential. But, in general, it’s not a problem if a sentence is self-referential. Consider, “This sentence is six words long”. That’s just true. No problem. Or “This sentence is seven words long”. That’s just false. No problem. But “This sentence is false” is not just self-referential, it self-referentially assigns itself a truth value. So, let’s take a step back.

You have to admit, our ordinary, natural language is a mess. It’s imprecise and ambiguous and, most importantly, as any computer programmer will tell you, natural languages are over-flexible. They allow sentences to do things like self-referentially assign their own truth value. Computer languages can be thought of as artificial languages that replace natural languages in some contexts. Some universities now have departments of “logic and computation” that are no longer part of the philosophy department. This kind of thing happens all the time historically, by the way –  some part of philosophy morphs into a science. Four hundred years ago physics was “natural philosophy” and now they expect their own offices.

Anyway, in such an artificial language you might think there should be a kind of hierarchy of types of sentences. So, in computing, or in [the philosopher Alfred] Tarski’s logic, sentences can only assign truth values to sentences that are lower in the hierarchy. They are forbidden to assign truth-value to themselves or any of the sentences that outrank them.

“This sentence is false” is just nonsense, then, because it violates this rule. On this way of looking at it, the “Liar’s’ Paradox” is evidence that you need to enforce such a rule and/or develop an artificial language – or you get insoluble paradoxes.

So, how can we resolve the “Liar’s Paradox”. Beats me. I am hoping you will leave the solution in the comments section so I can go tell my class.

LF (me): I wonder what it would mean to “resolve” the Liar’s Paradox? Regarding the simple case, “this sentence is false”, would we have to show why it’s actually a regular true or false statement, or that it’s meaningless or vague or ungrammatical? There are lots of ways language can be used poorly. For example, some statements are rude. “This sentence is false” is paradoxical and not paradoxical in a good way if you’re having a normal conversation. If you’re teaching a course and want to discuss the issues the sentence raises about language, it’s paradoxical in an excellent way. But, in general, we don’t have to resolve a paradox like “this sentence is false”. We just have to avoid talking paradoxically (or rudely, falsely, ungrammatically, etc.), unless there’s a special reason to do otherwise.

TS: Thanks for the comment. I get what you are saying, I think. But still…what, if anything, is wrong with “This sentence is false”? It doesn’t appear to be, as you say, “meaningless or vague or ungrammatical” or even “rude”. Calling it “paradoxical” is just giving it a name. So, what would a resolution look like? Here are my thoughts on what might qualify. It’s true. Appearances aside, it’s just false. It’s ill-formed logically or as a speech-act. It’s meaningless, because… My hunch is that self-referentially assigning its own truth value violates some kind of “rule”, but I would like to see what that rule is better characterized – because I think it would be informative.  

[LF]: I will try to clarify. Presumably, to resolve a paradox means to show that it isn’t paradoxical. To resolve a problem is to make it go away, to no longer be problematic. Yet “This sentence is false” is clearly paradoxical, so it can’t be resolved or addressed in that way.

The next question is why is “this sentence is false” paradoxical? It’s paradoxical because it gives with one hand and takes away with the other. In ordinary, practical terms, declarative sentences are supposed to say something that’s true, yet “this sentence is false” simultaneously suggests that it’s not true. If the statement is meant to convey accurate information, it fails. It’s paradoxical. If it’s meant as entertainment, however, or as an example in a philosophy course, the fact that it’s paradoxical isn’t a problem; it’s a perfectly fine way to speak.

It’s the same situation with the two-sentence version of the paradox (“the next sentence is false”; “the previous sentence is true”). In practical terms, uttering these two declarative sentences suggests that each sentence is both true and not true (the principal difference being that each sentence refers to the other, and thereby indirectly to itself, not directly to itself, as in the one-sentence case). It’s another unresolvable paradox, a case in which language is being used poorly, if it’s meant in the usual way, to convey accurate information when uttering declarative sentences. The two-sentence case isn’t ungrammatical or meaningless in the usual sense, or rude or vague, other ways in which language can be spoken inappropriately unless there are overriding reasons to speak in those ways, for dramatic effect, for example.

I don’t think there’s a rule against “self-referentially assigning [a sentence’s] own truth value”. For example, everything I’m saying in this paragraph, including this sentence, is true. The relevant rule is “don’t make a declaration and indicate that it’s not true, unless you have a good reason for being paradoxical or ironic”. In similar fashion, “don’t tell somebody to do something and not do it, unless you have a good reason for contradicting yourself and don’t want it to be done” and “don’t ask somebody a question if you don’t want an answer, unless it’s a rhetorical question”. There are ordinary ways to speak that work well. Don’t mess with the formula unless you have a good reason to. I think that’s as deep as we need to go.

(Note: “Don’t mess with the formula” are the immortal words of Mike Love, addressed to Brian Wilson when things began to get strange around 1966.)

Unquote. (Prof. Sommers hadn’t responded to my response last time I looked.)

One other thought. I’m enjoying my news vacation during these troubled and troubling times, even though news leaks through. One of the results of avoiding the news is that you’re living in a different context. It occurred to me that, if I ran across the phrase “Fump Truck” during a really thorough news vacation (or if FBI Director James Comey had followed the rules and kept his mouth shut in 2016), I’d probably think it was a variation on “Dump Truck”. It wouldn’t suggest an entirely different phrase (similar to, but not “Dump Trump”).