A discussion of sentences like the paradox of the Liar that outflank the usual diagnoses.

What is it about?

Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine's "multiple-meanings'' account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. Bradwardine's solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of an utterance. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine's successors in the fourteenth century. It is shown that Bradwardine's account of signification turns not on a distinction between principal and consequential signification, but between partial and total signfication, and that accordingly his solution, unlike those of his successors, does not fall prey to Rumfitt's paradoxes.

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Why is it important?

Besides making us better aware of discussions of such semantic and logical paradoxes during the middle ages, thus throwing further light on aspects that may have been overlooked in more recent literature, noting these paradoxes shows that the paradoxes cannot simply be solved by tinkering with the notions of truth and falsehood.