Insolubles

"Paradoxes, such as the Liar ('What I am saying is false'), fascinated medieval thinkers. What I said can't be true, for if it were, it would be false. So it must be false-but then it would be true after all. Attempts at a solution to this contradiction led such thinkers to develop their theories of meaning, reference and truth. A popular response, until it was attacked at length by Thomas Bradwardine in the early 1320s, was to dismiss such self-reference as impossible: no term (here, 'false') could refer to (or in medieval terms, "supposit for") a whole, e.g., a proposition, of which it is part. In light of Bradwardine's criticisms, Walter Segrave, writing around 1330, defended so-called restrictivism (restrictio) by claiming that such paradoxes exhibited a fallacy of accident. The classic example of this fallacy, the first of Aristotle's fallacies independent of language, is the Hidden Man puzzle: you know Coriscus, Coriscus is the one approaching, but you don't know the one approaching since, e.g., he is wearing a mask. But Aristotle's account is unclear and Segrave, building on ideas of Giles of Rome and Walter Burley, shows how the fallacy turns on an equivocation over the sup