SELF-REFERENCE IN LOGIC 2)3)
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A.N. WHITHEHEAD and B. RUSSELL definitively established in "Principia Mathematica" the necessity to exclude self-reference in logical statements, in order to avoid paradoxes and contradictions.
This excludes any "… self-referential utterances, statements, propositions, descriptions, etc.", as stated by R.H. HOWE and H.von FOERSTER (1975, p.1).
A curious result of this discovery is that languages are somehow autopoietic systems, able to produce only a limited – while enormous – number of statements, in accordance with their own combination rules, which by no means guarantee their logical soundness.
The self-reference problem is also related to GÖDEL's Incompleteness theorem.
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Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).
To cite this page, please use the following information:
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]
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