Good article. I would just like to add that this whole question of linguistic paradoxes is important for a fundamental debate in Western philosophy. This has t

Good article. I would just like to add that this whole question of linguistic paradoxes is important for a fundamental debate in Western philosophy. This has to do with the basic relation between language and reality. In one view, reality is such that it can be perfectly described by an appropriate set of precise philosophical concepts. In the other view, this is impossible, and language is just a tool that the human mind has developed that can only imperfectly describe reality. Russell was the twentieth century's leading advocate of the perfect language view. His student Wittgenstein started out there, but later changed to the latter view. And in fact, most of the major philosophers of the last hundred years or so have held the language-as-imperfect-tool view. I am interested in this question partly because if you start with the perfect language view, then for political philosophy you end up with something like Plato's philosopher-king. On the other hand, the imperfect tool view leads to something more like liberal democracy. And indeed, I think it is not an accident that Pragmatism, an imperfect-tool philosophy, developed in the United States.