Talk:self-referential meaning

Hmm ...

My first instinct was rfd, for lack of use or idiomaticity. But a quick search shows that it is used (e.g., in reviews of GEB &mdash; of course). The typical usage is in "layers of self-referential meaning", by which the writer presumably means something more like "inter-referring layers of meaning". I doubt the intent was "layers of meaning, each of which refers to itself."

Further, it's not clear what it would even mean for a meaning to refer to itself, while it's pretty clear that "self-referential meaning" means postmodern and/or Hofstadter-esque explorations of self-reference. In other words, it's not quite clear from the parts what the phrase would mean.

So I suppose it merits an actual definition. -dmh 05:45, 1 May 2005 (UTC)