The Yablo Paradox An Essay on Circularity

Roy T Cook examines the Yablo paradox--a paradoxical, infinite sequence of sentences, each of which entails the falsity of all others later than it in the sequence--with special attention paid to the idea that this paradox provides us with a semantic paradox that involves no circularity. He focuses on three questions that can be (and have been) asked about the Yablo construction: the Characterization Problem, which asks what patterns of sentential reference(circular or not) generate semantic paradoxes; the Circularity Question, which addresses whether or not the Yablo paradox is genuinely non-circular; and the Generalizability Question--can the Yabloesquepattern be used to generate genuinely non-circular variants of other paradoxes, such as epistemic and set-theoretic paradoxes? Cook argues that although there are general constructions-unwindings--that transform circular constructions into Yablo-like sequences, it turns out that these sorts of constructions are not 'well-behaved' when transferred from semantic puzzles to puzzles of other sorts.