REFLEXIVITY is a potent and popular concept; it is also a problematic and paradoxical one. The term is problematic because it is so popular today; it is used in several different disciplines to refer to a wide variety of mental, verbal, and performative phenomena that nonetheless share a family resemblance. Reflexivity is a paradoxical concept because the type of self-referential activity—consciousness of self-consciousness—that it denotes involves the epistemological paradox so well discussed by Gregory Bateson (1972, pp. 177–193) and Rosalie L. Colie (1966, pp. 6–8), in which the mind by its own operation attempts to say something about its operation—an activity difficult both to contemplate and to describe without conceptual vertigo and verbal entanglements.

In the most general sense, the terms reflexive, reflexivity, and reflexiveness "describe the capacity of language and of thought—of any system of signification—to turn or bend back upon itself, to become an object...