The word 'heterological' describes itself more than it describes 'monosyllabic', and less than it describes 'polysyllabic'. This seemingly innocuous sentence is actually the solution to a fundamental problem in language and philosophy: the paradox of self-reference.
The paradox of self-reference arises when a word is used to describe a property that it either does or does not possess. This leads to a contradiction and has puzzled logicians and philosophers for centuries. Many attempts have been made to resolve this paradox, but they often involve complex and controversial assumptions about the nature of language and reference.
In this article, we propose a new approach to solving the paradox of self-reference called relative heterology. The key idea behind relative heterology is to make explicit the comparison that is already implicit in the use of adjectives. When we use an adjective to describe a word, we are comparing the word to a set of other words that share the same property. By making this comparison explicit, we can avoid the paradoxes of self-reference and provide a more natural solution to the problem.
To illustrate the concept of relative heterology, consider the word 'heterological'. When we say that 'heterological' describes itself more than it describes 'monosyllabic', we are explicitly comparing it to other words. Similarly, when we say that 'heterological' describes itself less than it describes 'polysyllabic', we are explicitly comparing it to other words. Thus a triadic relation is the true relation, and the dyadic relation is elliptical.
By making this implicit comparison explicit, we can avoid the paradox of self-reference. When we ask whether 'heterological' is heterological, we are implicitly asking whether it possesses the property that it describes more than other words that share the same property. In this case, we can see that 'heterological' does possess the property of being heterological more than words like 'monosyllabic', but less than words like 'polysyllabic'. Therefore, we can answer the question without running into a paradox.