The Death of Philosophy by Thomas-Fogiel Isabelle; Lynch Richard;

Author:Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000, Philosophy/General, PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

This simple reasoning calls upon the entirety of my definition of self-reference. The thesis “must apply to itself,” and yet, if it is applied to itself, it self-terminates. It follows that it is false. This is a conception of truth and falsity (as the success or failure of a proposition’s application to itself) that thus ought to be listed along with the other conceptions, since it is mobilized at the most critical moment of the argument. Moreover, the employment of this type of relation to self (the application of a proposition to itself) is what makes possible, in Engel’s specific case, an outline of an answer to the question of reference to the world. Indeed, to reject relativism is to reject the idea that our discourse does not refer to anything tangible and is only the expression of contingent and isolated constructions. And yet what leads to Engel’s rejection is clearly the use of a reference that is not a reference to the world but a reference or a relation to self.

This analysis—which reveals how much even those who mean to challenge or ignore it are led to self-reference—shows us on the one hand that the mode of relation of an x to itself, far from having to be considered as something that we must track down and exclude, can be proposed as what will be likely to assure consistency for propositions that claim to be philosophical. On the other hand, it leads us to think that the question of reference (in the name of which the prohibition of self-reference was pronounced) actually goes through a consideration of the question of self-reference. Far from being a sterile “metaphilosophical” problem that enquires as far as the eye can see into the conditions of conditions—and so on to infinity—of the philosophical discourse,27 the question of philosophical propositions’ relations to themselves could indeed constitute a part of the answer to the question of a proposition’s relation to what it is not.

Consequently, we can say that the mode of reference ad extra is not the only one capable of being understood in terms of true and false, and that one can legitimately—despite Russell’s prohibition—consider that in certain circumstances reference to the utterance can enable a decision about truth and falsity (for example, in the case of the liar’s paradox). The opposition between traditions can no longer continue to be interpreted as an opposition between one definitively historically superannuated way of philosophizing and another, legitimate because more contemporary. This is why I am entitled here to answer the initial question—the question whether self-reference is strengthened by this confrontation with formal logic’s prohibition—in the affirmative.

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