Self-refuting idea
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Self-refuting ideas or Self-defeating ideas are ideas or statements whose falsehood is a logical consequence of the act or situation of holding them to be true. Many ideas are called self-refuting by their detractors, and such accusations are therefore almost always controversial, with defenders stating that the idea is being misunderstood or that the argument is invalid. For these reasons, none of the ideas below are unambiguously or incontrovertibly self-refuting. These ideas are often used as axioms, which are definitions taken to be true (tautological assumptions), and cannot be used to test themselves, for doing so would lead to only two consequences: consistency (circular reasoning) or exception (self contradiction). It is important to know that the conclusion of an argument that is self-refuting is not necessarily false, since it could be supported by another, more valid, argument. It is used primarily by absolutist philosophers to explain the paradox of the absolute, e.g. that if there is one absolute, then all other ideas and objects are absolutely relative to the absolute postulate, and therefore everything is an absolute.
Relativism
It is often stated that relativism about truth must be applied to itself. The cruder form of the argument concludes that since the relativist is calling relativism an absolute truth, it leads to a contradiction. Relativists often rejoin that in fact relativism is only relatively true, leading to a subtler problem: the absolutist, the relativist's opponent, is perfectly entitled, by the relativist's own standards, to reject relativism. That is, the relativist's arguments can have no normative force over someone who has different basic beliefs.
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