Dude, this is what I do for a living. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to editing the part of my paper on whether it’s wrong to commit child abuse against adults, torture a bicyclist who’s not a bicyclist, or murder the dead.

Is “chess,” as used in that sentence, the sign or the signified?

Is there any plausible riddle whose answer is chess itself rather than the word? If I ask you a question, can you properly answer it by sitting down and playing a board game?

Rarely have such momentous questions been pondered unstoned.

I think the fruitful question to ask here is: What is the answer to a riddle? Is always it a series of words, or the thing the words describe? As I see it, answers are linguistic entities, so I’d think it was a series of words. Answers probably shouldn’t differ in ontological status from questions, which really should be linguistic entities. (After all, questions don’t describe anything, so it’d be hard to point to the nonlinguistic thing the question was.) But maybe there’s some further argument to be given.

As written, the Borges sentence is

[. . .] the answer is chess .

not

[. . .] the answer is ‘chess.’

so ‘chess’ is being used in the sentence (i.e., the answer is the game of chess itself, not the word ‘chess’). Since ‘chess’ is being used, I think it is right to think it is self-violating.