"This Statement Is False"

Linguistic ambiguity is present whenever words are spoken or written.  In spite of this, linguistic communication is used consistently enough to accomplish a host of social goals.  There are some who like calling attention to just how vague language can be, though, and then there are some who go beyond this.  Such a person might conjure up some variation of the liar "paradox," a statement that is supposed to describe a liar who truthfully admits that he or she is lying and thus contradicts their own claim.  There are few examples of such asinine things to philosophically focus on than statements that can be partly true or partly false simultaneously (which is not contradictory) like the so-called liar paradox.  Not only is it impossible for someone to say nothing but lies, as a lie has to in some way distort or hinge on a truth even if the lie becomes self-defeating, but it is also true that the isolated comment "This statement is false" has no affirmative relationship to anything other than the sentence itself.

"This statement is false" is nothing but a vague, nonspecific phrase some people use to conflate language with logic as if the two are in any way synonymous.  A statement like "I perceive grass to be green," "Some things necessarily follow from specific ideas," or "It is possible for there to be an afterlife" can be true or false, but "This statement is false," without any preceding statement it refers to, provides no specific claim beyond an inescapably unclear comment often meant to confuse more than communicate.  This is why it is almost exclusively brought up in an attempt to argue against the effectiveness of language while using language or even in an attempt to mistakenly attack logic itself.  Regarding the former goal, using language to convey the ambiguity of language is ironic, but it is only self-refuting if the party communicating this means to say that language cannot refer to genuine truths at all.  Of course language can convey truths, yet people can only know which concepts they themselves mean by certain words.

Non-telepathic communication is inherently vague and can never truly bridge human minds in an ultimate sense.  After all, a person can only know with absolute certainty what they mean by their own words, but the words of others, no matter how clear or similar they seem, cannot be proven to correspond to the exact same concepts one would reference by using the same wording.  The words of others can be responded to with words that one knows the exact meaning of: one's own words.  There is no innate meaning of words.  For this reason, even the same words might have different intended meanings behind them, and all that one can rationally come to is that probabilistic communication is capable of sustaining human interactions without ever letting one party know the exact meanings of another party, as only what seems to be the meaning of someone else's words can be known.

No matter what words are used to communicate, every idea and belief are either true or false, and something is false if it contradicts the laws of logic or any other part of reality.  Awareness of logic precedes the use of language [1] and is the only way to navigate conversations without total confusion about which concepts one is referring to and what objectively follows from them.  "This statement is false" does not communicate any particular concept except that of a sentence which fails to make any sort of coherent claim about reality while still claiming that it itself is false.  Thus, there is nothing rational or worthwhile about the statement except its role as an example of how language is secondary and inferior to direct contemplation about reason, concepts, and experiences.

No one needs language to understand the laws of logic.  Knowledge of reason is at the very least required in an indirect sense to even associate words with concepts or think about any concept in the first place.  In the case of someone who has not directly reflected on logical truths themselves and yet still grasps reason on some level, awareness of and familiarity with reason is incomplete, cloudy, and subject to fluctuations.  This is the exact opposite of reason itself: all-encompassing and inflexible.  When examined rationalistically, sentences like "This statement is false" have no epistemological significance except as an example of pointless nonsense that separates asinine linguistic games from logic and the concepts logic governs.