Elephants and turtles

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium The origins everything. Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

A Hindu myth with a pretty obvious logical flaw that atheists like to think neatly demolishes the intellectual pretensions of organised religion — which it does — while not noticing now neatly it also demolishes the intellectual pretensions of secularists, lawyers, scientists and, well, atheists at the same time.

For here is the problem, friends: Every good dictionary is circular. Not just the Hindu one. If Douglas Hofstadter is to be believed, that very circularity — reflexivity — is the special sauce.

See also

• precedent
• Elephant
• law
• policy
• metaphysics