![]() The idea is that, if Jim and Susie are having a conversation, something who "ascends" one level and talks about their conversation itself is being "meta". This is why today we use "meta" to mean something like being self-referential in this way. They took it to be a new, interesting use of the prefix "meta-", referring to Aristotle's act of "ascending" above his book on nature to write a book about the nature of nature, metaphysics. When people noticed this, they thought the "meta" in "metaphysics" meant something more than the editors' comment on the placement of the treatise in Aristotle's collected works. So it looks as though it contains arguments that are one level above the subject matter of the Physics or you could say they are about what underlies the subject matter of the Physics. (As others have pointed out, meta means "behind" or "after" in ancient Greek.)īut Aristotle's Metaphysics is full of arguments about what it means for something to have a nature, what it is for something's nature to adequately explain it, and so on. So they put it after the Physics in their collection and just named it "the book after the Physics", or Metaphysics. But they couldn't come up with a good name for the book we now call Aristotle's Metaphysics. The ancient Greek word for "nature" in this sense is physis, so they called the book Physics. They knew what to call the treatise we now know as Aristotle's Physics: it was a treatise about nature, and what kind of explanations for things we can make on the basis of knowing their natures. The legend is that our current use of the word originated with the people who put together Aristotle's collected works. *or whatever weapon is currently in favor For example, if you go to /r/darksouls3 you could find people saying things like 'straight swords* is the current pvp meta and I hate it' Over time this meaning has morphed, and now 'meta' can also simply mean 'best equipment'. When someone posts "Ayy gringo" and someone replies "2meta2fast" they mean that the Ayy gringo meme refers to something else that happened on reddit that day.Įdit: forgot another common usage case! In games like league of legends and world of warcraft, 'meta' refers to the 'metagame', the game of optimizing your abilities and equipment so you can perform better in the base game. It's just taken as something that refers to something else now. When you see someone commenting "so meta" on reddit, it's influenced by this second meaning, only without the self- part. ![]() The metalanguage is a language that talks about another language (sometimes also referred to as orders 2nd order logic is about 1st order logic). A metanarrative is a narrative of narratives. Meta can mean after (as in metaphysics or metamorphosis), but how it's used on the internet now is more closely related to a different meaning. ![]()
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