Ramsey's Ladder, again

Maybe I've said this before:

We want to preserve the first rung, but not the rest. We want to leave S meaningful, or rather usefully meaningful (!) where S="X is true"; but we want to leave "S is true" vacuous.

Rules, of course, work like this. If S="It is a rule that X", this means something. But to say "It is also a rule that S" is vacuous. We don't have a 'master' rule that says we must follow the rules. To propose something as a rule is just to propose that it should be complied with (with contextual qualifications, and under agreement).

If statements of truth values are, or are importantly like, statements of rules, then statements attributing truth or falsehood to statements of truth values will always be vacuous.

The traditional liar paradox is a statment about the truth value of itself: "This statement is false" contains a statement about a truth value. Taken as a rule, it is simply incomprehensible: there is no answer to the questions 'What way does this rule require us to talk?'.

And it only appears to be consequential if we allow the rule that we should follow the rules ...

Is it true that we should tell the truth (generally, with appropriate caveats etc.)? It's vacuously true, in a playable game. Its falsehood can't be a move in a playable game.

And:

"We should always talk as though this statement is false" is incomprehensible at the first level - it simply cannot mean what, at first sight, it pretends to mean. It tells us to do something that is logically impossible. (What it appears to mean is something that would falsify an interpretive hypothesis, in the Davidsonian sense).