an object referring to itself indirectly. For example, "this sentence is false." contains a direct self-reference, in which the phrase "this sentence" refers directly to the sentence as a whole. An indirectly self-referential sentence would replace the phrase "this sentence" with an indirect reference; an expression that effectively still referred to the sentence, but did not use the pronoun "this."

Indirect self-reference can be defined rigorously in terms of cycles in a graph of reference relationships.