1. ‘Paradoxes of cosmological Self-Reference’
Robert M. Anderson Jr., Minnesota
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, VE,
eds. G. Maxwell and R. M. Anderson Jr.
Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P.

2. A cosmology gives account of the world.

3. Only what the cosmology says, goes.

4. The cosmology says what meaning is.

5. The cosmology says what it is to communicate.

6. The cosmology says whether anything is contingent, whether anything is necessary.

7. And what it is for anything to be contingent or necessary.

8. The cosmology says how things can be known, and therefore what is known.

9. It therefore says how it, itself, is known.

10. Thus the cosmology says what it is for it to say something.

11. All this is to
say that...

12. What is, is.

13. What is known and what knows is part of what is.

14. Hence what is, determines what is known and what knows.

15. When a person says what is, her saying of what is, is part of what is.

16. Thus, what is, determines what it is to say what is.

17. In other words, what is, says what is.

18. ‘Can I say what I am? I am a collection of atoms with such and such properties. But what has been accomplished with such a phrase? Some atoms have arranged themselves in a particular pattern within me. And what has been accomplished in this answer? Some atoms have arranged themselves in a pattern within me. My atoms say that they are atoms’ (p. 539).

19. ‘Perhaps when Western analysis, the scientific method, is pushed to extremes it leads to Eastern mysticism’ (p. 540).