(Untitled)

[further_on]

in conversing with certain strong acquaintances of mine earlier this evening (arguably the first of two thousand seven, although the starting point is quite arbitrary) we arrived - by way of a joke involving the word "farce" - at the idea of words that are what their definitions mean. the most perhaps obvious example of this is "word;" here are

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[screamphoenix]

i'd add "metaphor," because to my own unofficial idea of language, it's all metaphor. goedel's theorem doesn't really apply here, i think, because language isn't coherent like the mathematical systems he was busting up. goedel basically imported a version of the epimenides paradox ("this statement is a lie," put shortly)into principia mathematica. that system, like others of its kind, let people find "theorems" in it, and each theorem was a true thing. their goal, ultimately, was to make a system that contained every truth and only truths, and a lot of people thought the principia had a good chance of doing that. goedel's theorem (call it "n")was "theorem n is not in principia mathematica." the principia had to admit or disallow the theorem; systems like that can't do both and remain coherent, unlike langauge, which is to me an observer-defined system that doesn't necessarily answer to those observers (though sometimes it does), if you want to call that a system. if theorem n were excluded from the principia, there would be truths the