Self-referential statements mention themselves or their components, often producing logical paradoxes, such as Quine's paradox.
Willard Van Orman Quine | Quine | Richard Quine | Quine's paradox |
She has argued that strict-ordering Foundationalism, in the vein of Rudolf Carnap, is untenable, supporting Quine's argument from Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
The book touches on the rise of model theory as well as proof theory, and on the emergence of American research on the foundation of mathematics, especially in the hands of E. H. Moore and his students, of the postulate theorists, and of Quine.
(Reply: W. V. Quine, "Response to Leemon McHenry" Process Studies, The Forum, 26, pp. 13–14; reprinted in Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne and the Analytic Tradition, ed by George Shields, State University of New York Press, 2003, pp. 171–173, and Quine in Dialogue, ed by Dagfinn Føllesdal and Douglas Quine, Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 257–58.)
His emphasis on formal rigor in specifying the type of knowledge that was eventually to be called "ontologies" by computer scientists, led him to the field of formal ontology in philosophy, where he began to study the metaphysics literature, focusing on the work of such notables as Quine, Strawson, and especially Simons.
Quine's criterion can be seen as a logical development of the methods of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, who assumed that one must accept the existence of entities corresponding to the singular terms use in statements one accepts, unless and until one finds systematic methods of paraphrase that eliminate these terms.
Functions with a large number of variables have to be minimized with potentially non-optimal heuristic methods, of which the Espresso heuristic logic minimizer is the de facto standard.
Other related terms in philosophy and in cognitive science include "ontological relativity" (as in Quine) and "cognitive relativism" (as in Jack Meiland).
Quine also toured in support of the album and can be seen on the recorded Bottom Line show titled A Night with Lou Reed.