Musics I done

Thursday, May 12, 2005

who shaves grilly?


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:

laurence said...

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.