GrellingNelson paradox
The GrellingNelson paradox is a semantic self-
referential paradox concerning the applicability to itself
of the word "heterological", meaning inapplicable to it-
self. It was formulated in 1908 by Kurt Grelling and
Leonard Nelson and sometimes mistakenly attributed to
the German philosopher and mathematician Hermann
Weyl.[1] It is thus occasionally called Weyls paradox as
well as Grellings paradox. It is closely analogous to sev-
eral other well-known paradoxes, in particular the barber
paradox and Russells paradox.
1 The paradox
Blue
Blue
The rst instance of the word blue is autological while the sec-
ond is heterological.
Suppose one interprets the adjectives autological and
heterological as follows:
1. An adjective is autological (sometimes
homological) if and only if it describes itself.
For example, the English word English is auto-
logical, as are unhyphenated and pentasyllabic.
2. An adjective is heterological if it does not describe
itself. Hence long is a heterological word (because
it is not a long word and is shorter than short), as
are hyphenated and monosyllabic.
All adjectives, it would seem, must be either autological
or heterological, for each adjective either describes itself,
or it doesn't. Problems arise in a number of instances,
however:
1.1 Paradoxical cases
The GrellingNelson paradox arises when we consider
the adjective heterological. One can ask: Is hetero-
logical a heterological word? If the answer is 'no', het-
erological is autological. This leads to a contradiction,
for in this case heterological does not describe itself: it
must be a heterological word. But if the answer is 'yes,
heterological is heterological. This again leads to a con-
tradiction, because if the word heterological describes
itself, it is autological.
Is heterological a heterological word?
no heterological is autological hetero-
logical describes itself heterological is
heterological, contradiction
yes heterological does not describe itself
heterological is not heterological, contra-
diction
The paradox can be eliminated, without changing the
meaning of heterological where it was previously well-
dened, by modifying the denition of heterological
slightly to hold all nonautological words except hetero-
logical. But nonautological is subject to the same para-
dox, for which this evasion is not applicable because the
rules of English uniquely determine its meaning from
that of autological. A similar slight modication to the
denition of autological (such as declaring it false of
nonautological and its synonyms) might seem to x
that, but the paradox still obtains for synonyms of auto-
logical and heterological such as selfdescriptive and
nonselfdescriptive, whose meanings also would need
adjusting, and the consequences of those adjustments
would then need to be pursued, and so on. Freeing En-
glish of the GrellingNelson paradox entails considerably
more modication to the language than mere renements
of the denitions of autological and heterological,
which need not even be in the language for the para-
dox to arise. The scope of these obstacles for English is
comparable to that of Russells paradox for mathematics
founded on sets.
1
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1.2 Arbitrary cases 3 See also

One may also ask if autological is autological. It can be List of paradoxes
chosen consistently to be either:
Metamagical Themas
if we say that autological is autological, and then
ask if it applies to itself, then yes, it does, and thus Usemention distinction
is autological;
if we say that autological is not autological, and 4 Notes
then ask if it applies to itself, then no, it does not,
and thus is not autological.
[1] Weyl refers to it as a well-known paradox in Das Kon-
tinuum, mentioning it only to dismiss it. Its misattribution
This is the opposite of the situation for heterological:
to him may stem from Ramsey 1926 (attested in Peckhaus
while heterological logically cannot be autological or 2004).
heterological, autological can be either. (It cannot be
both, as the category of autological and heterological can- [2] Newhard, Jay (October 2005). Grellings Para-
not overlap.) dox. Philosophical Studies. 126 (1): 127.
doi:10.1007/s11098-004-7808-z.
In logical terms, the situation for autological is:

autological is autological if and only if au-

tological is autological
A if and only if A, a tautology
while the situation for heterological is:
heterological is heterological if and only if
heterological is autological
A if and only if not A, a contradiction.
1.3 Ambiguous cases
One may also ask whether loud is autological or hetero-
logical. If said loudly, loud is autological; otherwise, it
is heterological. This shows that some adjectives cannot
be unambiguously classied as autological or heterologi-
cal. Newhard sought to eliminate this problem by taking
Grellings Paradox to deal specically with word types as
opposed to word tokens.[2]
5 References
Grelling, K.; Nelson, L. (1908). Bemerkungen
zu den Paradoxien von Russell und Burali-Forti.
Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule II. Gttingen.
pp. 301334. Also in: Nelson, Leonard (1974).
Gesammelte Schriften III. Die kritische Methode in
ihrer Bedeutung fr die Wissenschaften. Ham-
burg: Felix Meiner Verlag. pp. 95127. ISBN
3787302220.
Ramsey, Frank P. (1926). The Foundations
of Mathematics. Proceedings of the London
Mathematical Society. 2. 25 (1): 338384.
doi:10.1112/plms/s2-25.1.338.
Peckhaus, Volker (2004). Paradoxes in Gttin-
gen. In Link, Godehard. One hundred years of
Russells paradox: mathematics, logic, philosophy.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 501516. ISBN
3110174383.

2 Similarities with Russells para-

dox 6 External links

The GrellingNelson paradox can be translated into Autological words

Bertrand Russell's famous paradox in the following way.
First one must identify each adjective with the set of ob-
jects to which that adjective applies. So, for example, the
adjective red is equated with the set of all red objects.
In this way, the adjective pronounceable is equated with
the set of all pronounceable things, one of which is the
word pronounceable itself. Thus, an autological word
is understood as a set, one of whose elements is the set it-
self. The question of whether the word heterological
is heterological becomes the question of whether the set
of all sets not containing themselves contains itself as an
element.
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