Selfreferentiality

Self-referentiality, or self-reference, is the property of referring to oneself or to the system in which one operates. It occurs when content, rules, or structures incorporate direct or indirect references to themselves, creating a loop between description and object.

In logic and philosophy, self-reference can generate paradoxes, such as the liar paradox, where a sentence states that it is false. Formal theories often address this with layering or using fixed points. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem employs a self-referential construction—effectively a statement that says it is not provable within the system—to demonstrate limits of formal arithmetic. Related discussions include the definability of truth and self-referential definitions.

In literature, self-reference is a hallmark of metafiction and postmodern works, which foreground their status as artifacts and probe questions of authorship, fictionality, and narrative authority. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino have used self-referential devices to blur boundaries between fiction and reality.

In computing, self-referential objects and programs appear as quines—programs that output their own source code. Other examples include self-hosting compilers and interpreters, as well as self-referential data structures, where a design references itself within its own architecture.

In linguistics and semantics, self-reference arises through indexicals and pronouns that point to the utterance, speaker, or context, and through sentences that describe their own content, truth value, or structure. This broad notion spans philosophy, mathematics, literature, computer science, and language.