I’m re-sharing this image, a variation on the “This sentence is false” type paradoxical sentences . In the original comments, I mentioned that it is from a book by Douglas Hofstadter (author of “Godel, Escher, Bach”) of a collection of his “Metamagical Themas” column for Scientific American (which he took over and renamed as an anagram of the “Mathematical Games” column from Martin Gardner when he retired). And I had mentioned that there were lots of other wonderful – and hysterical – examples of self-referential sentences in the book. I find myself laughing out loud at them no matter how many times I see them. But I couldn’t quote any of them at the time because I had loaned the book out to someone. Well, I finally got it back, so I’d like to quote some of my other favorites here (though there are simply too many to quote all of them, so just a taste here). In the opening portion the author talks about what it means to be self-referential and the distinction between “use” and “mention” (mentioning something typically has quotes around it while using something it is just, well, used, don’t you know. So first, here are some paradoxical self-reference examples of the use-mention distinction (and note in these examples that there is often a progression from one sentence to the next to expound on an idea – often in very funny ways): ------------ You can’t have your use and mention it too. You can’t have “your cake” and spell it “too”. “Playing with the use-mention distinction” isn’t “everything in life, you know”. In order to make sense of “this sentence”, you will have to ignore the quotes in “it”. This is a sentence with “onions”, “lettuce”, “tomato”, and “a side of fries to go”. This is a hamburger with vowels, consonants, commas, and a period at the end. ------------ Ok, well here are some others: ---------- Thit sentence is not self-referential because “thit” is not a word. When you are not looking at it, this sentence is in Spanish. If this sentence were in Chinese, it would say something else. If wishes were horses, the antecedent of this conditional would be true. If this sentence were false, beggars would ride. What would this sentence be like if it were not self-referential? This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter. because I didn’t think of a good beginning for it. This sentence was in the past tense. This sentence has contains two verbs. a preposition. This sentence ends in This is not a complete. Sentence. This either. This sentence contains only on nonstandard English flutzpah. This gubblick contains many nonskarklish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context. This sentence has cabbage six words. (Douglas Hofstadter notes in the book about the last example above, “In my opinion , it took quite a bit of flutzpah to just throw in a random word so there WOULD be cabbage six words in the sentence.” This sentence will end before you can say “Jack Rob ------------ Well, gotta run, but you get the idea. I may post a few others later when I have time.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 21:11:51 +0000
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