Ceci N'est Pas Magritte

                                      

                                  ^ By René Magritte, my favorite surrealist arist.

Perhaps the most arresting, however, is 'The Treachery of Images' ('La Trahison des Images'), pictured below:

means: "This is not a pipe." en la français.

I am perusing a brilliant book I own—a metaphorical tour de force called "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Braid"—which features this image and one of many hypothetical dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise (à la Lewis Carroll) who problematize the foundations of logic. The dialogue goes as follows:

"Tortoise: That means, "This is not a pipe". Which is perfectly True.

Achilles: But it IS a pipe!

Tortoise: Oh, you misunderstand the phrase, I believe. The word "ceci" (this) refers to the painting, not to the pipe. Of course the pipe is a pipe. But a painting is not a pipe.

Achilles: I wonder if that "ceci" [this] inside the painting refers to the WHOLE painting, or just to the pipe inside the painting."

The author proceeds to list some simple examples of self-reference in sentences:
(1) This sentence contains five words.
(2) This sentence is meaningless because it is self-referential.
(3) This sentence no verb.
(4) This sentence is false. [Epimenides Paradox]
(5) The sentence I am now writing is the sentence you are now reading.

All but the last one involve the mechanism contained in the phrase "this sentence", but they all are "floating" in the context of the English language, left up to the reader to figure out the referent of the phrase "this sentence". The whole idea is a little mind-boggling at first, but an image might help out. On one level, it is a sentence pointing at itself; on the other level, it is a picture of Epimenedes executing his own death sentence.

This is exactly what I want to do when I think about it. By the way, it is interesting to point out that the word "this" appears in the previous sentence; yet it is not there to cause self-reference, because you probably understood that its referent was the image, rather than the sentence in which it occurs.

Indeed, language is enourmously complex.