Philosophy:Autological word
An autological word (or homological word)[1] is one that expresses a property that it also possesses. For example the word "pentasyllabic" has five syllables, and the word "writable" is writable.
The opposite is a heterological word, one that does not apply to itself. For example the word "long" is not long, "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable and "non-hyphenated" is hyphenated.
Unlike more general concepts of autology and self-reference, this particular distinction and opposition of autological and heterological words is uncommon in linguistics for describing linguistic phenomena or classes of words, but is current in logic and philosophy where it was introduced by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson for describing a semantic paradox, later known as Grelling's paradox or the Grelling–Nelson paradox.[2]
One can ask: Is "heterological" a heterological word? If the answer is "no", then "heterological" is autological. This leads to a contradiction, for in this case "heterological" does not describe itself: it must be a heterological word. But if the answer is "yes", then "heterological" is heterological. This again leads to a contradiction, because if the word "heterological" describes itself, it is autological.
See also
- Metaplasm
- Self-reference
- Appendix:English autological terms on Wiktionary
References
- ↑ "homological", The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (2005), ed. Simon Blackburn, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press
- ↑ Grelling and Nelson used the following definition when first publishing their paradox in 1908: "Let φ(M) be the word that denotes the concept defining M. This word is either an element of M or not. In the first case we will call it 'autological', in the second 'heterological'." (Peckhaus 1995, p. 269). An earlier version of Grelling's paradox had been presented by Nelson in a letter to Gerhard Hessenberg on 28 May 1907, where "heterological" is not yet used and "autological words" are defined as "words that fall under the concepts denoted by them" (Peckhaus 1995, p. 277)
Further reading
- Volker Peckhaus: The Genesis of Grelling's Paradox, in: Ingolf Max / Werner Stelzner (eds.), Logik und Mathematik: Frege-Kolloquium Jena 1993, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1995 (Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie, 5), pp. 269–280
- Simon Blackburn: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. Oxford 2005, p. 30 ("autological"), p. 170 ("heterological"), p. 156 ("Grelling's paradox")
External links
- Henry Segerman: A list of autological words
- A brief look into the different types of autology by Ionatan Waisgluss
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