In the Sophist, Plato asks how there can be false statements. A false statement (logos) says what is not. But a statement cannot say nothing – there must be something that it says. Plato tries to solve the puzzle by investigating the notion of not-being and the notion of a logos. To understand not-being, we must first understand being. That in turn requires understanding how something can be called by many different names. Plato’s solution to these problems rests on the distinction between what something is of itself and what it is because it is related to other things. It also rests on an understanding of the notion of difference. The class of not-beautiful things, for example, is a real group: they are different from the beautiful things. Similarly, not-beings are a real group. The upshot is this: “Theaetetus is flying” is false, in that flying is different from what is with reference to Theaetetus. Theaetetus has being. Flying has being. But “Theaetetus is flying” says with reference to him what is not.

I argue that Aristotle thinks of perception as veridical, and that phantasia – as a secondary motion consequent on perception – is responsible for all sensory error. I neutralize passages where Aristotle seems to countenance misperception by defending what I call an “object-oriented reading,” which holds that though Aristotle says we can make errors about the objects of perception, he is not committed to thinking that we can perceive them erroneously, as there are faculties besides perception (including phantasia) that engage with the objects of perception. According to the object-oriented reading, apparent misperception results when a false phantasia is mistaken for a perception, something that is possible due to the similarities between perception and phantasia. Nonetheless, since the faculties are distinct, perception remains veridical. I also address how this conception of phantasia can explain Aristotle’s appeals to phantasia in contexts like memory, thought, and animal motion.

This concluding chapter draws together some threads of the book, byfacing some objections about negation and more generally about theconceptions of truth, falsity, validity, invalidity, and theirinterrelations. The main question – why are there paradoxes?– is asked three last times.

This chapter examines the critique of the production of affect advanced by a range of thinkers in the Marxist tradition, above all, Theodor Adorno, but also including Herbert Marcuse, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson. It focuses in particular on what Adorno describes as the ‘diversionary function’ of ostensibly positive affective states – especially what he calls ‘fun’, a multiply freighted word, as the chapter shows – and asks what it means to categorise such states as ‘false’. The degree to which affective states are open to misinterpretation by those undergoing them is, therefore, a central question in this chapter. Drawing on Keston Sutherland’s recent emphasis on the role of disgust in Marx’s satirical account of capitalist production, the chapter will in conclusion emphasise the affective charge of the Marxist critique of affect itself.

The chapter presents a traditional model of partially defined predicates, its rejection of bivalence, and its responses to versions of the Sorites. An intractable problem with the model is then identified as arising from three assumptions: (i) the language containing the predicates is spoken by a vast but ill-defined community, (ii) the linguistic rules make fine-grained distinctions that go unnoticed by speakers, and (iii) the rules are abstracted from uses of the predicates. Progress, it is argued, requires dispensing with (i), embracing a plurality of micro-languages, and using them to construct perfected versions of (ii) and (iii). The resulting model defines the micro-language centered on an individual x at a time in terms of the dispositions of x to affirm or deny certain predicates of objects. Coordinated languages constructed from micro-languages centered on different individuals in a communicative situation allow one to assign assertive contents to uses of sentences. Given this, one can show how precise, knowable (though unknown) demarcations between items in the range of a vague predicate are determined. The technique, available to both defenders and opponents of excluded middle, can be used to reconstruct attractive responses to the Sorites, without some important defects.