To reference one needs a thing and its name. It is this difference between a thing and its name which enables reference. When these are clearly separate as in "The dog ran after the stick" there is no confusion.
When names name themselves however things get tricky and paradoxes arise.
A thing followed by its quote is a quine. "A thing followed by its quote is a quine."
This loose (since it is not completely grammatical) but easy to see example is both doing the referring to "a thing" and is also a quine itself. It is what I'll call an indefinite self reference since it refers to the group of which this sentence belongs.
Of more interest are definite self-references that actually refer by name to the thing doing the referring.
"I am going out."
and
"Alva is going out", said Alva
would be me definitely referring to myself. This is also direct self-reference since the name is given explicitly: a pronoun "I" or actually my name. "This" also acts as direct self-reference, as in:
This sentence has five words.
In a definite self-reference such as these the object referred to does not belong to the group referred to but is actually the object referred to.
Another type of self-reference is indirect self-reference. It is still definite self-reference because it makes reference to the particular entity that is itself, but indirectly.
"preceded by its quote makes the sentence." preceded by its quote makes the sentence.
Which sentence we are not told but we know that the the sentence being referred to is made from the phrase being quoted before itself... which is what happens in the sentence so we know that it is referring directly although indirectly to itself. This is a direct version of the opening quine. This is the process of Quining, or making a Quine which is the means of indirect self-reference.
GOOD ARTICLE ON REFERENCE
Following links Strict Evaluation is what I was complaining about in self-defining entities (which passed into the discussion on impredicativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impredicativity where something can never be evaluated e.g. T:={T}. Yet it seems that set-theory still allows this definition to my knowledge.)
Quotes
The usual way to create a name from a piece of text is to put it in quotes.
The dog ran after the stick. We now know that a dog once ran after a stick. It is proposing (though we don't know if actually happened) that a particular dog did this thing, and the object being referred to is that dog. If I wish to refer to that the words in that sentence then I would write "The dog" which no longer means the furry thing with a wagging tail but rather the 6 letters that make up the name used to refer to the furry thing with a wagging tail.
Hierarchy
The world is hierarchical which is to say that any object is composed from other objects and at the same time belongs to higher groups. Objects may be members of many groups at the same time so it is not a clear ordering.
If we refer to a table as "My table" and say that I have moved the table to my new home, it can be assumed that all the components of the table also went. It might be however that a screw from the table was lost during the move. In reality selfhood is a very inexact science.
If I say that I am a member of the rugby team and the rugby team just played in Coventry then
one can automatically assume that I just went to Coventry. So I am indefinitely referring to myself when I refer to the rugby team. I might then say that I scored a try. Now I am definitely referring to myself and we are sure that I went to Coventry. But then I might say that I had a bike accident after the game and lost my leg. This is shown in the venn-diagram to the left.
We are accustomed to thinking of the leg as part of me and myself as part of the rugby team. But a little contemplation shows this up and leaves us with a complex hierarchy of overlapping things. The leg I lost was useful and a part of the rugby team just as much as it was to my job or whatever else I do. Likewise I might lose a lot more in the accident, but as each thing is cut off in which part do I remain - in what remains of my body or in the pile of amputated tissues? Some would say the brain, but the start cutting that into parts! Self does not reside at any particular level. Yet mysteriously in the world of mass interconnecting things there are those that are somehow more relevant and those that are not, like the difference between Alva's leg and yours. This is another issue, and I don't understand it yet.
Hierarchy shows itself in self-reference because when we refer to a self which aspect of the hierarchy are we referring to? "I am right" could mean that sentence, but this is pointless. More usually it means the discussion in which it is uttered is right. But a discussion has many parts and often some are more right and some are more wrong.
The issue of translation.
The true statement "This sentence has thirty one letters." seems quite straight forward but in french "Cette phrase a trente et une lettres." is false. The equivalent true sentence in French is "Cette phrase a vingt a neuf lettres." which has 29 letters. This self-reference is making a statement about the form of a sentence but the two sentences are understood in different semantic systems so their truth changes: the first commonly makes sense in English the others in French. Choosing the semantic system can't be done within the syntax (basically the marks on the page) [or can it?]. So translations traditionally compare the semantics between languages and create the syntax in the new language to simulate the semantics in the old language. This doesn't necessarily preserve truth however as this example shows and if preserving truth is more important then the semantics may need to change also!
Meta
The difference between name and thing (which interestingly the knowing deeply of being the goal of Buddhist vipassana meditation) is what ensures the meta level. However through self-references this distinction can become very blurred which is how paradoxes arise. This sentence is false. The previous sentence is the famous paradox being both the object of discussion and also being a meta statement saying about the object of discussion that it is false. People complain about this but fact remains it is a sentence within the semantic system of English that we understand and get stuck in infinite evaluative loops with.
In Passing a note to say that link between thing and name is subtle as any answer needs to talk about the link itself and so depends upon link itself. A constructivist approach is clearly out of the question and we can only hope for a phenomenological/hermaneutic approach of accepting the hermaneutic circle of prior referencing at the outset of the discussion.
Levels of Reference.
A system can reference when it has names.
It can self-reference when it has a name for the system or anything in the hierarchy above the entity doing the referencing.
References can be definite where they pick out an exact entity e.g. the object itself or indefinite where they pick out an entity to which the object belongs; or direct where they make the reference explicitly or indirect where it is implied.
Things within the entity doing the referencing are referred to relative to the above hierarchy. For example the nineteenth word in this paragraph is actually the word "nineteenth" but the referenced entity was given relative to the paragraph not the statement making the reference.
Self is completely hierarchical and I need to think about this more and the idea that inside all the circles is a homunculus giving them a centre and a "relevance". Shades of what Herpatia and the ancient world were thinking about in Agora... and while cosmologically we've moved on, in terms of our deep world view still no progress!
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