selfreferenced

Self-referenced is an adjective describing statements, structures, or processes that refer to themselves or to their own properties. The term is used across disciplines to signal self-reflexivity: a thing's content or behavior points back to itself.

In logic and philosophy, self-reference underpins several paradoxes and formal results. A sentence that asserts something about its own truth value or about provability can produce paradoxes such as the Liar and strengthen the need for formal hierarchies or self-reference controls. Gödel's incompleteness theorems use a form of self-reference to construct a statement that effectively says, "I am not provable within the system," creating limits on formal theories.

In literature, film, and art, self-reference is a stylistic device in metafiction and related genres. Works that draw attention to their status as art or to the act of reading often foreground self-reference, creating layered or playful commentary on representation.

In mathematics and computer science, self-reference appears in recursive definitions and fixed-point theory. A function that calls itself, a data structure that contains a reference to itself, or a program that applies itself are practical manifestations. The Y combinator in lambda calculus expresses a way to realize recursion through self-application.

Other domains include linguistics and cognitive science, where self-reference arises in discourse about language itself, and in systems theory, where feedback loops enable self-regulation.

Although self-reference can illuminate structure and creativity, it also poses challenges for consistency and interpretation.