Yes, and no.

The 'boot straps' story itself is a reworking of a passage from 'Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia', a 1785 novel written by Rudolf Erich Raspe, and based on the real Prussian baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, a war general renowned for telling completely unbelievable but very entertaining tall tales.

At one point during the book, Baron Munchausen accidentally rides his horse into a swamp, becoming trapped, with him and his steed sinking fast.

With no obvious way out, and everything he could grab out of reach, Munchausen somehow manages to lift himself and his horse out of the swamp by grabbing his own ponytail and pulling himself and his horse up and out of the mire.

This is why in philosophy, all epistemologies (systems of thinking) are said to fall into the Munchausen Trilemma, in which once one reasons to their most basic components, said epistemologies ultimately support themselves by themselves in one of three ways.