Priam Sen is an impact investor who pursues opportunities in various sectors, with a focus on those with social and environmental benefits. Also focused on philosophy and spirituality, Priam Sen has a strong interest in phenomenon in the cosmos and the way that they point toward metaphysical truths.

One of the early definitions of the concept of truth is explored in Paolo Crivelli’s book Aristotle on Truth (Cambridge University Press, 2004). According to the author, Aristotle held that the “bearers of truth and falsehood” come in three major forms: utterances, thoughts, and objects. The latter include essences and immaterial objects, as well as material substances and states of affairs that may arise.

In Book IV of his metaphysics, Aristotle held that no sentence can be contradictory. In the centuries since, the liar’s paradox has often been used to challenge this. A self-referential sentence, the classical formulation “I am speaking falsely” carries with it an apparently unsolvable contradiction. If the utterance is true, it must also necessarily connote falsehood, and this creates semantic incoherence.

As Crivelli views it, Aristotle’s response in a passage from Sophistical Refutations is that sometimes an utterance is neither true nor false. This has to do with what seem to be predicative assertions that depend on context. Truth is malleable in that “any bearer of truth or falsehood can, at least in principle, be true at one time and false at another.”