Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Self-defeating ideas


Wonderful Wikipedia has a wonderful article about (wonderfully) the notion of ideas that, logically, self-destruct (but which may be popularly long-lived, nevertheless).  We polemicised against one of them -- eliminative materialism -- here.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-refuting_idea

To this propositional or assertoric notion of a self-refuting idea, we may add the illocutionary or pragmatic idea of a self-immolating statement.   As: 

The current issue of The New Yorker has a worthwhile demurral by John Lanchester:

Shut Up and Eat:
Down with foodism

Hear, hear.  Only -- that mini-essay appears (ausgerechnet) in the annual semi-bloated “Food Issue”, which I hurled into the trash-basket, almost unread.

No comments:

Post a Comment