SOURCE: "Moore's Paradox Revisited," in Synthese, Vol. 87, No. 1, April, 1991, pp. 295-309.

In the following essay, Linville and Ring apply Ludwig Wittgenstein's principles to Moore's paradox.

Wittgenstein "once remarked that the only work of Moore's that greatly impressed him was his discovery of the peculiar kind of nonsense involved in such a sentence as, e.g., 'It is raining but I don't believe it'".¹ Present practice is to refer to the difficulties generated by sentences of this form, as well as to sentences of the form "I believe that p but not p", as "Moore's paradox".² Despite Wittgenstein's great reputation and regard for the importance of Moore's "discovery", little interest has been generated in the topic. And yet, central issues in epistemology and the philosophy of language are involved in the resolution of this paradox. Since this is not generally appreciated, we begin our discussion by establishing what some...