ABSTRACT
The suppositions that project philosophical thought experiments often involve paradoxes, that is, aporetic situations in which one must somehow extract personally from inconsistency plausibilities rather than mere suppositions. This is illustrated by The Bibliography Paradox, a logical conundrum of self-reference that is based on the following riddle: It all seems plausible enough but something has gone awry. Accordingly, the line contemplated in this chapter is rather different from Bertrand Russell's Vicious Circle Principle even though it accomplishes much the same work. Rather, it addresses itself to the communicative issue of the conditions that must be met for a purportedly identifying description of an object to succeed in specifying a well-defined referent and thereby present a meaningful object of discussion. The paradox at issue here effectively self-destructs by constituting its own reductio ad absurdum. Its generating supposition cannot be taken at face value.
