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What is "self-contradictory"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
self-contradictory
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ In the last analysis, it is illogical because it is self-contradictory.
▪ It sounds awkward, almost self-contradictory.
▪ It was magnificent; but it was nonsense, and self-contradictory nonsense.
▪ Once more, though, the poem reveals a play of language which render meaning unstable and even self-contradictory.
▪ Practice, like all other abstract modes of experience, is ultimately self-contradictory.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-contradictory

Self-contradictory \Self`-con`tra*dict"o*ry\, a. Contradicting one's self or itself.

Wiktionary
self-contradictory

a. Of statements that contradict themselves, ultimately logically corrupting the statement.

WordNet
self-contradictory

  1. adj. seemingly contradictory but nonetheless possibly true; "it is paradoxical that standing is more tiring than walking" [syn: paradoxical]

  2. in disagreement; "the figures are at odds with our findings"; "contradictory attributes of unjust justice and loving vindictiveness"- John Morley [syn: at odds(p), conflicting, contradictory]

Usage examples of "self-contradictory".

A double-bind game is a game with self-contradictory rules, a game doomed to perpetual self-frustration--like trying to invent a perpetual-motion machine in terms of Newtonian mechanics, or trying to trisect any given angle with a straightedge and compass.

The great, good-tempered fellow, as uncouth in its hairiness as Nebuchadnezzar during his lamentable but salutary attack of boanthropy, is regarded with a good deal of suspicion, if not dread, though it pays for its lodging by reason of its large appetite, which latter statement seems self-contradictory.

Either conventional arithmetic was intrinsically flawed, and the whole Platonic ideal of the natural numbers was ultimately self-contradictory .

And he then proceeds, as saw in chapter 1, to show that the very belief in this systems view is self-contradictory.

Hence the fanaticisms and intoxications--religious, political, and sexual, the Nazis, the Klan, Hell's Angels, the Circus Maximus, the dreary fascination of the TV screen, witch-burnings, Mickey Spillane and James Bond, pachinko parlors, alcoholic stupors, revivals, tabloid newspapers, and juvenile gangs--all of which, as things stand, are the necessary safety-valves and palliatives for human beings whose very existence is defined in self-contradictory and self-defeating terms.