strange loop

A phenomenon in which, whenever movement is made upward or downward through the levels of some heirarchial system, the system unexpectedly arrives back where it started. Douglas Hofstadter has used the strange loop as a paradigm in which to interpret paradoxes in logic, such as Grelling's paradox and Russell's paradox, and has called a system in which a strange loop appears a tangled hierarchy.

Related category

• LOGIC

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