Self-referential incoherence

From Neoredemptive

An often-overlooked logical fallacy in which some claim is made which, upon being applied to itself, refutes itself.

The most popular example is the claim that "there is no truth"; for this claim to be true, the claim itself would have to be false, yielding a contradiction ("A and not A"). Thus, the claim is nonsensical (or, at least, irrational). This example generalizes to any universal statement denying the plausibility of universal statements (e.g., "all theories are contextual", "nothing is knowable with certainty", etc).

Systems of thought (a.k.a. worldviews or paradigms) can also be self-referentially incoherent when they support chains of inference which are self-contradictory. For example, ontological naturalism begets Darwinism from which we infer that ideas are survival adaptations with no ontological significance or bearing; however, this directly implies the irrationality of asserting ontological naturalism -- if Darwinism is true, then a thinker has no "objective place" outside of the change-driven survival shortcuts coded in their brain from which to figure out whether anything is true or false. They are thus trapped with the illusion of perception, logic, reason, and knowledge which an unguided and meaningless evolutionary process has left them, but can have no expectation that these correspond with anything except useful neurological tweaks that helped their ancestors get laid more frequently.