Gaṅgeśa on Self-Mentioning Words

Abstract

Thought involves language and for everything in this universe that we can think of we must have some word or other at our disposal to refer to. Thus, for sound and linguistic elements we also have words, e.g., ‘sound’, ‘word’, ‘sentence’ etc. The interesting question here is: how is a word related to itself if it stands for itself? Is the relationship same as the one that obtains between a word and its designatum, or is it different? The philosophers of the Western tradition have recently shown interest in such questions, and most of them now accept the distinction between using and mentioning although they normally discuss the issues with reference to words of written language and independently of the issues concerning meaning. But such questions regarding self-reference of linguistic elements were considered by philosophers of India in the past to be part of the theory of meaning.