The Term "meta"

 Introduction

The word meta comes up in a variety of different fields from philosophy to linguistics to theatre and even gaming. It represents an interesting concept and is often used as an adjective where an author breaks the fourth wall(like this!), when something refers to itself (like this blog post) or when we try to ascend one level of abstraction and analyze the governing dynamics of some process rather than analyzing the process itself. The word root meta comes from greek which loosely means change', 'between' and 'beyond'. In video game Jargon, it also means 'Most Effective Tactic Available', which is again, the discussion of the tactics behind the game instead of analyzing the game itself. To understand those definitions clearly, here are some words that are derived from the same root.

• Metacognition: Thoughts about our own thoughts
• Meta conversation: A conversation about a conversation
• Metacriticism: A criticism of another criticism
• Metagame: A game about other games 
• Metapolitics: Politics of Politics
• Metaphilosophy: Philosophy of philosophy
• Metaphysics: nature of nature*

My Thoughts

 

1.There is always a trade-off- an example of this could be meta-research. There is a trade-off between allocating our resources for improving the quality of research and actually using those resources to conduct a larger number of studies. Intuitively, the only way to optimize this trade-off is 'meta meta research'. However, we run into a similar problem there, and we must ascend another level of abstraction.In a recursive manner, we realize that the only way to absolutely optimize our decisions would be to theoretically reach an infinite level of abstraction. The higher the level of abstraction, the better the information. However, analogous to the Taylor series approximations, we can decide where we want to stop depending on the situation and the accuracy required.

 

 2. Meta-Irony- from the examples presented above, it can be seen that most words involving the root meta can be represented as 'something of something'. from this perspective it is very amusing(mind-boggling) to think of what meta-irony means. The irony of irony does not cancel out the irony. This happens because if one tries to convey the opposite of the intended meaning through irony, then the opposite of the opposite of the intended meaning is conveyed through meta irony which makes the actual meaning ambiguous.

     To conclude, I'd like to not tell you to not think about this too much. Thank you for reading.

Footnotes

*This is not a real definition, as the word is very hard to define.