Self-reference - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Self-reference occurs in natural

Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

or formal languages when a sentence

Sentence (linguistics)

In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...

or formula

Formula

In mathematics, a formula is an entity constructed using the symbols and formation rules of a given logical language....

refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding

Semantics encoding

A semantics encoding is a translation between formal languages. For programmers, the most familiar form of encoding is the compilation of a programming language into machine code or byte-code. Conversion between document formats are also forms of encoding. Compilation of TeX or LaTeX documents to...

. In philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, it also refers to the ability of a subject to speak of or refer to himself, herself, or itself: to have the kind of thought expressed by the first person pronoun, the word "I"

I (pronoun)

I is the first-person singular subjective case personal pronoun in Modern English. It is used to refer to one's self and is capitalised, although other pronouns, such as he or she, are not capitalised.-Etymology:...

in English.

Self-reference is studied and has applications in mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, philosophy

Philosophy

, computer programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

, and linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

. Self-referential statements sometimes have paradox

Paradox

Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...

ical behavior.

Usage

An example of a self-referential situation is the one of self-creation, as the logical organization produces itself the physical structure which creates itself.

In metaphysics

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

, self-reference is subjectivity

Subjectivity

Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...

, while "hetero-reference", as it is called (see Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.-Biography:...

), is objectivity.

Self-reference also occurs in literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

and film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

when an author refers to his work in the context of the work itself. Famous examples include Cervantes

Cervantes

-People:*Alfonso J. Cervantes , mayor of St. Louis, Missouri*Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, 16th-century man of letters*Ignacio Cervantes, Cuban composer*Jorge Cervantes, a world-renowned expert on indoor, outdoor, and greenhouse cannabis cultivation...

's Don Quixote, Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....

's Jacques le fataliste et son maître
Jacques le fataliste et son maître
Jacques the Fatalist and his Master is a novel by Denis Diderot, written during the period 1765-1780. The first French edition was published posthumously in 1796...

, Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

's If on a winter's night a traveler
If on a winter's night a traveler
If on a winter's night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The narrative is about a reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Every odd-numbered chapter is in the second person, and tells the reader what he is doing in preparation for...

, many stories by Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

, Lost in the Funhouse
Lost in the Funhouse
Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of loosely connected short stories that was originally published by John Barth in 1968. These postmodern stories examine the art of fiction writing, among other things, and seem to undermine the conventional and predictable nature of fiction...

by John Barth

John Barth

John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.-Life:...

, Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...

's Six Characters in Search of an Author
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello.The play is a satirical tragicomedy. It was first performed in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, to a very mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of "Manicomio!" .Subsequently the play enjoyed a much...

, and Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...

's 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...

. This is closely related to the concepts of breaking the fourth wall

Fourth wall

The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play...

and meta-reference

Meta-reference

Metareference, a metafiction technique, is a situation in a work of fiction whereby characters display an awareness that they are in such a work, such as a film, television show or book. Sometimes it may even just be a form of editing or film-making technique that comments on the...

, which often involve self-reference.

The surrealist painter René Magritte

René Magritte

René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...

is famous for his self-referential works. His painting The Treachery of Images
The Treachery Of Images
The Treachery of Images is a painting by the Belgian René Magritte, painted when Magritte was 30 years old. The picture shows a pipe...

, shown above, includes the words this is not a pipe, the truth of which depends entirely on whether the word "ceci" (in English, "this") refers to the pipe depicted—or to the painting or the sentence itself.

In computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, self-reference occurs in reflection

Reflection (computer science)

In computer science, reflection is the process by which a computer program can observe and modify its own structure and behavior at runtime....

, where a program can read or modify its own instructions like any other data. Numerous programming languages support reflection to some extent with varying degrees of expressiveness. Additionally, self-reference is seen in recursion

Recursion

Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...

(related to the mathematical recurrence relation

Recurrence relation

In mathematics, a recurrence relation is an equation that recursively defines a sequence, once one or more initial terms are given: each further term of the sequence is defined as a function of the preceding terms....

), where a code structure refers back to itself during computation.

Other examples

Many of the following examples appear in Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...

's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Metamagical Themas
Metamagical Themas
Metamagical Themas is a collection of eclectic articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published together as a book in 1985 by Basic Books ....

, or I Am a Strange Loop
I Am a Strange Loop
I Am a Strange Loop is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in depth the concept of a strange loop originally developed in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach....

.

Words

A word that describes itself is called an autological word
Autological word
An autological wordis a word expressing a property which it also possesses itself...

(or autonym
Autological word
An autological wordis a word expressing a property which it also possesses itself...

). This generally applies to adjectives, for example sesquipedalian, but can also apply to other parts of speech, such as TLA, as a three-letter abbreviation

Abbreviation

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase...

for three-letter abbreviation, and PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

which is a recursive acronym

Recursive acronym

A recursive acronym is an acronym or initialism that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands...

for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".

Mathematics

Impredicativity
Loop (graph theory)
Loop (graph theory)
In graph theory, a loop is an edge that connects a vertex to itself. A simple graph contains no loops....
Tupper's self-referential formula
Tupper's self-referential formula
Tupper's self-referential formula is a self-referential formula defined by Jeff Tupper that, when graphed in two dimensions, can visually reproduce the formula itself...

Cognition

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...

research suggests the existence of neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is a non-specific neuroscience term referring to the ability of the brain and nervous system in all species to change structurally and functionally as a result of input from the environment. Plasticity occurs on a variety of levels, ranging from cellular changes involved in...

, a phenomenon in which thinking processes unconsiously change the neural circuitry and structure of the brain via sensory experience, input from the environment or reactions hitherto.

Self-referential sentences

There is a special case of meta-sentence in which the content of the sentence in the metalanguage and the content of the sentence in the object language are the same. Such a sentence is referring to itself. However some meta-sentences of this type can lead to paradoxes. "This is a sentence." can be considered to be a self-referential meta-sentence which is obviously true. However "This sentence is false" is a meta-sentence which leads to a self-referential paradox.

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Quine's Paradox
Quine's paradox is a paradox concerning truth values, attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine. It is related to the liar paradox as a problem, and it purports to show that a sentence can be paradoxical even if it is not self-referring and does not use demonstratives or indexicals...

(This is a version of the liar paradox
Liar paradox
In philosophy and logic, the liar paradox or liar's paradox , is the statement "this sentence is false"...

, an example of indirect self-reference
Indirect self-reference
Indirect self-reference describes an object referring to itself indirectly.For example, define the function f such that f = "x". Any function passed as an argument to f is invoked with itself as an argument, and thus in any use of that argument is indirectly referring to itself.This example is...

through a quine, which leads to a paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...

.)

"This sentence contains thirty-eight letters."

Linguistics

A reflexive

Reflexive verb

In grammar, a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient are the same. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself...

sentence has the same subject

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...

and object

Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...

(e.g., "The man washed himself"). In contrast, a transitive

Transitive verb

In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...

sentence requires the subject and object to be non-identical (e.g., "The man hit John").

Fumblerules

Fumblerules are humorous rules for writing, collected from teachers of English grammar. A fumblerule contains an example contrary to the advice it gives, such as "don't use no double negatives", "eschew obfuscation" and "never use a preposition to end a sentence with", a form of self-reference.The...

state rules of good grammar and writing through sentences that violate those very rules. (Examples: "Avoid cliches like the plague" and "Don't use no double negatives".) George L. Trigg and William Safire have made their own lists, but anyone knowledgeable of grammar can do the same.

In popular culture

James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

's Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...

contains multiple references to itself.
Paul Auster
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...

's The New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass , Ghosts and The Locked Room , it has since been collected into a single volume.- Plot introduction :...

, specifically City Of Glass
City of Glass
City of Glass may refer to:* Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada* City of Glass , a 1985 novel by Paul Auster** City of Glass: The Graphic Novel, a 1994 graphic novel adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli...

.
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...

' film Spaceballs
Spaceballs
Spaceballs is a 1987 American science fiction comedy parody film co-written by, directed by, Mel Brooks and starring Bill Pullman, John Candy, Mel Brooks & Rick Moranis. It also features, Daphne Zuniga, Dick Van Patten, and the voice of Joan Rivers. The film was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on...

uses the video release of the movie that the audience is watching to see what will happen in the future.
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...

mentions his own work La Galatea and the novel Don Quixote itself in the novel Don Quixote. A character of an apocryphal version of Don Quixote acknowledges that Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are the real ones and not those of the apocryphal text, which implies that the reader is one of the characters of the novel.
In DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

' Legion of the 3 Worlds, The main antagonist, Superboy Prime, is the Clark Kent
Clark Kent
Clark Kent is a fictional character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Appearing regularly in stories published by DC Comics, he debuted in Action Comics #1 and serves as the civilian and secret identity of the superhero Superman....

from a destroyed iteration of the real universe, supremely displeased from how his favourite comic books turned out while journeying in their multiverse (depicted as coexisting with the real one). Eventually, Clark returns to our dimension, where is confronted by his distraught parents and girlfriend, having read the chronicles of his villainous action from the comic books published after his "departure".
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a screenwriter. He is also the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia.-Life:Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts,...

's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a memoir by Dave Eggers released in 2000. It chronicles his stewardship of younger brother Christopher "Toph" Eggers following the cancer-related deaths of his parents....

has characters referring to their role in the book and references to the book itself.
Michael Ende
Michael Ende
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende was a German author of fantasy and children's literature. He is best known for his epic fantasy work The Neverending Story; other famous works include Momo and Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver...

's The Neverending Story
The Neverending Story
The Neverending Story is a German fantasy novel by Michael Ende, first published in 1979. The standard English translation, by Ralph Manheim, was first published in 1983...

uses self-reference of the book prominently, when a character (Bastian) of a story within the story (also called 'Neverending Story') finds a book called the same, and it is the same book the reader is reading.
Jostein Gaarder
Jostein Gaarder
Jostein Gaarder /ˈju:staɪn ˈgɔːrdər/ is a Norwegian intellectual and author of several novels, short stories and children's books. Gaarder often writes from the perspective of children, exploring their sense of wonder about the world. He often uses metafiction in his works, writing stories within...

's Sophie's World
Sophie's World
Sophie's World is a novel by Jostein Gaarder, published in 1991. It was originally written in Norwegian, but has since been translated into English and many other languages. It sold more than 30 million copies and is one of the most successful Norwegian novels outside of Norway...

, in which the titular character realizes she is the character in a book.
Ain Gordon
Ain Gordon
-Life:He began writing and directing for the stage in 1985. He emerged on to the downtown dance/performance scene with four consecutive seasons at Dance Theater Workshop plus performances at Movement Research, The Poetry Project, and Performance Space 122...

and David Gordon
David Gordon
David Gordon is an American author and trainer and early contributor to the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.Gordon has helped create and shape the field of NLP since some decades yet. Gordon's main areas of contribution have been the use of therapeutic metaphors, inspired by his work...

's Obie Award
Obie Award
The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards given by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City...

-winning play The Family Business, in which a character who is a playwright is asked what he is writing. "This," he replies, "I'm writing this."
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...

's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls: A Comedy of Manners is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein published in 1985. Like many of his later novels, it features Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw as supporting characters.-Plot summary:...

considers the universe, or multiverse
Multiverse
The multiverse is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise all of reality.Multiverse may also refer to:-In fiction:* Multiverse , the fictional multiverse used by DC Comics...

, as an author-manipulated object, including the plot of the book itself.
The title of Steal This Book
Steal This Book
-Advice on dissidence:The book includes advice on such topics as growing cannabis, starting a pirate radio station, living in a commune, stealing food, shoplifting, stealing credit cards, preparing a legal defense, making pipe bombs, and obtaining a free buffalo from the Department of the Interior...

(by the activist Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....

)
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...

's Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll"....

uses self-referencing mathematical (formal language
Formal language
A formal language is a set of words—that is, finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens that are defined in the language. The set from which these letters are taken is the alphabet over which the language is defined. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar...

) and English (natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

) sentences, pictures (M.C. Escher's dragon for example), and music (Bach
Bạch
Bạch is a Vietnamese surname. The name is transliterated as Bai in Chinese and Baek, in Korean.Bach is the anglicized variation of the surname Bạch.-Notable people with the surname Bạch:* Bạch Liêu...

's fugues) to convey the concept and its recursive nature.
Some Monty Python
Monty Python
Monty Python was a British surreal comedy group who created their influential Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series...

sketches involves characters consulting or referring to the script to determine what to do next. Their film Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a 1974 British comedy film written and performed by the comedy group Monty Python , and directed by Gilliam and Jones...

is extensively self-referencing, including numerous on-screen references to incidents in "Scene 24"; soundtrack music being repeatedly noticed and silenced by a character; a sotto voce admission that a castle is "only a model", and the like.
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...

's Six Characters in Search of an Author
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello.The play is a satirical tragicomedy. It was first performed in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, to a very mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of "Manicomio!" .Subsequently the play enjoyed a much...

involves a collection of people that show up at a play rehearsal, claiming to be characters in search of a playwright to help them finish their story. The play plays itself out as a way of (possibly) doing just that.
The Sesame Street
Sesame Street
Sesame Street has undergone significant changes in its history. According to writer Michael Davis, by the mid-1970s the show had become "an American institution". The cast and crew expanded during this time, including the hiring of women in the crew and additional minorities in the cast. The...

book The Monster at the End of This Book
The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover
The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover is a post-modern children's book based on the television series Sesame Street and starring Grover. It was written by Jon Stone and illustrated by Michael Smollin, and originally published by Golden Books in 1971...

references itself in the title, as well as throughout the story.
Carly Simon
Carly Simon
Carly Elisabeth Simon is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children's author. She rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records, and has since been the recipient of two Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for her work...

's song "You're So Vain
You're So Vain
"You're So Vain" is a song written and performed by Carly Simon and released in December 1972. The song is a critical profile of a self-absorbed lover; Simon asserts "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." The subject's identity has been the matter of speculation, fueled by...

", which contains the lyrics, "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you."
In Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.-Biography:...

's novel Niebla ("Fog") the main character, Augusto Pérez, confronts Unamuno himself and has a quarrel with his author and inventor, reproaching Unamuno to have created him.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...

refers to himself as the author in his novel Breakfast of Champions
Breakfast of Champions
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Set in the fictional town of Midland City, it is the story of "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." One of these men, Dwayne Hoover, is a normal-looking but...

, where he has a conversation with himself about the writing of the novel itself. The character Kilgore Trout
Kilgore Trout
Kilgore Trout is a fictional character created by author Kurt Vonnegut. He was originally created as a fictionalized version of author Theodore Sturgeon , although Trout's consistent presence in Vonnegut's works has also led critics to view him as the author's own alter ego...

also engages in a conversation with the author.
Several classic Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television...

animated cartoons show characters going into a movie theatre, where they watch a version of the cartoon they're in.
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson , known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic...

's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy
Schrödinger's Cat trilogy
The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy is a trilogy of novels by Robert Anton Wilson consisting of The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons, each illustrating a different interpretation of quantum physics...

takes place in a universe where the books of the trilogy exist. Indeed, a character named Robert Wilson exists in the third book, and he is aware that he is a character in a book, having read the book and found himself described there.
The 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction is about a character's knowledge that he is apparently living out a story written by an author, complete with narration which is audible to him. He eventually confronts the author, identifying himself as a character from one of her books.

External links

Self-Referential Story, from the Internet Oracularities #1353
Self-Referential Aptitude Test, by Jim Propp
Self-reference and apparent self-reference
Self-reference jokes
The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change, by Peter Suber (Peter Lang Publishing, 1990). A book-length study of self-reference in law. (Out of print, but the full text is available online)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (at archive.org) Self-Reference in ``Self-Reference in `Self-Reference in ...'", a review of a review of a review of ... (archived at WebCite
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Usage

Other examples

Words

Mathematics

Cognition

Self-referential sentences

Linguistics

Fumblerules

In popular culture

See also

External links