grilly explaining 'russel's paradox' to rachel.
i was actually trying to use my favourite example, 'grelling's paradox':
divide the adjectives in english into two categories: those which are self-descriptive ('autological'), such as "pentasyllabic"... and those which are not ('heterological'), such as ..."bisyllabic". autological is clearly itself an autological word.
is heterological?
paraphrased from hofstadter.
1 comment:
if instead of heterological it was nonautological (okay i'm clutching at straws with my word use here) then it definately would be autological right?
so then how can heterological be self-descriptive when the word means something different to the word that is autological (nonautological)?
like i said before.. i don't think it is self-descriptive. it only describes itself via an example (rather than the meaning of the word itself) and that also requires context to be understood.
fuck this is hard to explain.
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