The Liar Paradox — “This sentence is false” — is often treated as one of the great immovable problems of logic. Its simplicity is disarming: a single clause, self-referential, generating an oscillation between truth and falsity that no classical semantics can stabilise. It has been invoked to justify hierarchies of language, restrictions on self-reference, or elaborate type-theoretic architectures designed to keep expression from looping back onto itself.
But beneath the familiar formulation lies a deeper presupposition — one that silently drives the paradox into being: the assumption that meaning can evaluate itself from a neutral, frame-independent standpoint.
Once that assumption is exposed and removed, the Liar Paradox does not merely dissolve — it becomes a window into the relational conditions that make meaning possible at all.
1. What the Liar Paradox assumes: meaning without perspective
The paradox depends on an implicit metaphysics:
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A proposition exists as an object independent of construal.
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That proposition has a definite truth value, also independent of construal.
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A truth-evaluating standpoint is available that does not change the proposition being evaluated.
In other words, the paradox assumes:
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a sentence as a representational thing,
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truth as a property that sticks to that thing,
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and a viewpoint outside the system that can assess the truth without affecting the conditions of evaluation.
Relational ontology rejects all three.
There are no free-standing propositions, no frame-invariant truth values, and no evaluative standpoint that can look “from nowhere.” Meaning exists only as construed — as the product of a perspectival cut through a relational system.
Once this is recognised, the Liar Paradox becomes a demonstration not of contradiction but of metaphysical incoherence in the assumptions that generate it.
2. Meaning as relational: construal, system, and instance
The relational ontology distinguishes:
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System — potential, a theory of what can be meant.
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Instance — actualisation, a perspectival event of meaning.
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Construal — first-order phenomenon: meaning as it appears in experience.
These are not layers of description but the relational structure of semiosis itself.
A clause, then, is not a thing with a truth value; it is an instance of a systemic potential, construed from a particular perspective. Truth is not a property but a relation between an instance and the perspective from which it is evaluated.
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A clause cannot evaluate itself from the same cut that constitutes it.
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A construal cannot be the object and the evaluator at once.
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No meaning can be stabilised from a perspective that includes its own conditions of evaluation.
This is exactly what the Liar Paradox attempts to force.
3. Why “This sentence is false” is not a paradox but a perspectival impossibility
The Liar sentence tries to function simultaneously as:
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the instance being evaluated,
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the evaluator of that instance, and
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the systemic frame that defines the evaluative relation.
But in relational ontology:
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System cannot be instantiated from its own instance-position;
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Instance cannot serve as its own evaluative context;
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Construal cannot collapse the distinction between meaning-as-event and meaning-as-evaluation.
The paradox appears only when these distinct relational roles are conflated into one.
In relational terms:
The Liar Paradox fails because it attempts to perform a cut that evaluates itself without shifting frames — an impossibility.
Or more specifically:
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The sentence “This sentence is false” is an attempt to instantiate a meta-evaluative relation from within the object-level instance, without allowing the perspectival shift required to make evaluation possible.
The Liar clause is not false and not true; it is non-instantiable under any single cut.
It tries to be phenomenon, meta-phenomenon, and theory of phenomena simultaneously — which no meaning can be.
4. Why every classical “solution” is patchwork on a representational problem
The traditional responses — Tarski’s hierarchy of object-language and meta-language, type-theoretic barriers, Kripke’s truth-value gaps, paraconsistent logics — all share a single goal:
Prevent the sentence from attempting to evaluate itself.
But the relational ontology achieves the same without any restriction:
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Not because self-reference is banned,
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but because self-evaluation is not structurally possible.
In other words:
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The Liar sentence can be formed (system).
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It can be construed (instance).
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But it cannot be evaluated from the same frame that instantiates it.
The instant one tries to perform that evaluation, one has already moved to a new perspective — and the “sentence” one is evaluating is no longer the same instance.
Therefore:
The paradox is not a logical contradiction; it is a performative illusion created by forgetting that meaning is perspectival.
5. The relational restatement: what the Liar Paradox actually teaches
Seen through the relational cut, the Liar Paradox becomes a profound lesson in the ontology of meaning:
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A meaning cannot evaluate itself without becoming a different meaning.
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Truth is not a property but a relational stance.
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No single perspective can contain both an instance and the meta-conditions that evaluate it.
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The attempt to speak from “outside” meaning is structurally impossible.
Thus, the Liar Paradox reveals the deepest insight of relational ontology:
There is no view from nowhere.
Meaning is always “this side” of its own conditions.
The paradox collapses because it presupposes an impossible observer — one who is simultaneously inside and outside the frame of evaluation.
Or, in our preferred idiom:
A clause cannot construe the construal that construes it.
The cut cannot simultaneously stand apart from its own cutting.
Conclusion: the paradox that was never a paradox
The Liar Paradox persists only as long as we attempt to treat clauses, truth-values, and evaluative stances as independent objects that can all be housed in the same representational space.
Once meaning is reconceived as relational and perspectival:
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The Liar clause is not paradoxical,
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truth is not an object-level property,
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and the supposed contradiction dissolves into a mis-cut.
The Liar Paradox is a reminder — not of the limits of logic, but of the relational nature of meaning:
No instance can internalise the system from which it is cut.No meaning can evaluate its own grounding.And no sentence can speak the truth about itself without becoming something else.
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