I've been working on an informal treatment of the Liar paradox (The sentence is not true. If it's true, it's not true, and if it's not true, it is true). I've probed some of the vast literature about it, but since most of the proposed solutions require heavy advanced logic machinery which I don't master (and do not want to master, for that matter), I've finally decided it's best to deal with the paradox more or less my own way.
In a nutshell, my solution involves a realization that the Liar sentence is not both false and true at the same time, that it's just a tantalizing bit of fun and shouldn't be taken too seriously, and that real-life situations of (milder) contradiction suggest a pragmatic treatment may work best. Pragmatic is used here in the everyday sense of 'taking a sensible, not too principled approach' and in the linguistic sense, referring to the work of Paul Grice, whose main claim is that in normal speech, we adhere to what he calls the Cooperative Principle; since the Liar sentence clearly doesn't comply to his conversational Maxims (like being unambiguous, being informative), the only reasonable conclusion is that the speaker addressing us with a silly question like Will your answer to my question be "no"? probably just invites us to have a bit of a laugh -- or to say "Oh, shut up!".
So, stay tuned for a long post, in which I will also highlight some of the sensible and less sensible ideas that have previously been formulated by people attacking the paradox.
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