Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The act, state, or fact of contradicting oneself.
- noun An idea or statement containing contradictory elements.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The act or fact of contradicting one's self: as, the self-contradiction of a witness.
- noun A statement, proposition, or the like which is contradictory in itself, or of which the terms are mutually contradictory: as, the self-contradictions of a doctrine or an argument.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The act of contradicting one's self or itself; repugnancy in conceptions or in terms; a proposition consisting of two members, one of which contradicts the other.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun logic A
statement that contains acontradiction , or apremise from which one could be derived
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun contradicting yourself
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Pritchett's main assertion contains a core of self-contradiction.
Let's Increase Poverty, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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But the quote above shows that Vedder is careful about trying to limit self-contradiction.
Richard Vedder, Sounding Reasonable, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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In short, they were an inherently modern movement, even though their ideology and rhethorics were anti-modern (which is pretty much the self-contradiction at the heart of fascism).
Save Kiana Firouz Hal Duncan 2010
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I would only make this specific argument from self-contradiction against someone who claimed that no mental states exist (i.e., some version of eliminative materialism), or a radical skeptic who claimed that we know nothing about mental states.
The Philosophy of Introspection, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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Or, as Schutz puts it, in what at first glance seems a self-contradiction, “while gesture fails to alter the sound of the note, it … alters the way the note sounds.”
The scientific case for live music ewillett 2010
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Problem is, we see the principled irony and self-contradiction, those others only that we be fools.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Terrorfare: one more story and it’s officially a trend 2010
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To infer that mutation and selection did the creating because nothing else was available, and then to bring God back into the picture as the omnipotent being who chose to create by mutation and selection, is to indulge in self-contradiction.
Blast From the Past 2010
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I think “it is not an abstraction that animates them” could actually be a pretty revealing sentence, and not merely a bizarre self-contradiction.
Matthew Yglesias » Peretz: Obama Needs “Harsh View of Islam Today” 2010
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This is not simply incoherent and irresponsible, but a monument to self-contradiction.
A civil rights official disgraces himself Jennifer Rubin 2011
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He concluded the week with a self-contradiction on ABC's This Week, saying he both opposed continuation of the debt ceiling -- which would trigger a default -- and favored legislation preventing default.
Michael Sigman: Pander-monium Breaks Out Among 2012 GOP Hopefuls Michael Sigman 2011
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