Editorial Interruption and Imagination in Curriculum and Pedagogy, or How to Get Caught Inside a Strange Loop RUBÉN A. GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada In his 1979 acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter puts forth the notion that the mind (and there- fore consciousness) is a paradoxical, self-referential, and recursive “strange loop.” Like the hand that paints the hand, that paints the hand in M. C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands” or like monks that climb a tower only to end up where they began in his “Ascending and Descending,” strange loops appear to make logical sense at one level, but contradict the logic of subsequent levels of meaning, rendering a paradox that inevitably returns us to the first level. This sentence, for instance, is not a strange loop. It (the previous sentence) refers to itself, but it does not contradict itself; we can accept without further levels of interpretation that it is not a strange loop. This sentence, however, is a strange loop. It (the previous sentence) is also self-referential, and at one level it does not appear to contradict itself, which would mean that the sentence is not a strange loop. This first-level conclusion, while perfectly reasonable, would imply that the sentence is false (i.e., the sentence is not a strange loop), which would contradict the first-level conclusion that the sentence does not contradict itself. Yet, if it does not contra- dict itself, then it would not be a strange loop, therefore contradicting itself, and so on and so forth. The playful example in the previous paragraph is an elaboration of the Epimenides paradox, which Hofstadter uses throughout his book as an illustration of a simple (one-level) linguistic “strange loop.” Epimenides was a Cretan who claimed that all Cretans were liars, a paradox from which Hofstadter (1979) derives a simple strange loop: “This statement is false.” As Hofstadter argues: It is a statement which rudely violates the usually assumed dichotomy of statements into true and false, because if you tentatively think it is true, then it immediately backfires on you and makes you think it is false. But once you’ve decided it is false, a similar backfiring returns you to the idea that it must be true. (p. 17) The self-reference produces a recursive movement between levels of logic that despite the appearance of forward movement from one level to another, leads us back to where we started, beginning again, and again, ad infinitum, like a double-sided Mobius strip that turns out to have a single continuous surface. © 2010 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto Curriculum Inquiry 40:3 (2010) Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2010.00490.x