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Well, that's a pretty large assumption. At least in american English, the phrase 'this _____' is commonly understood to be self-referential in some manner unless some other context has been previously established. For example:

This sentence contains ten words and is a true statement.

If you haven't read Godel, Escher, Bach, now is the time.



Oh, come on, guys. Those who read www.thedailywtf.com are well aware that a logical statement can be:

a) true

b) false

c) file not found


Self-referrential to the words themselves, or to the meaning of the words?


Depends on what sort of metaphysics of propositions you accept, whether you want to deal with an extensional or an intensional language, and a whole bunch of other stuff that generally only philosophers and some mathematicians have cared about.

If you're interested, though, let me know and I'll see what I can dig up for you from back when I was studying this stuff.


Either, and occasionally both, my favorite example being 'this sentence no verb'. There's a big difference between being able to find a way out of a given paradox and in being able to generalize that insight to makes statements about computability (or proofs, in the context of mathematics).




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