The Semantics of Taoist Paradox: Part 1

One of my favorite books in college was Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching. (Here, I found it pirated online). If you haven’t heard of it, the Tao te Ching is a book of ancient Chinese wisdom. No, not the kind about powdered tiger nethers, the kind that imparts a philosophical approach to living. I like it because it uses teaching paradoxes to do so.
Basically, the whole book is a series of linguistic paradoxes designed to crack your head open. This allows the melting remains of your formally-rigidly conceptual categories to drain. The text uses words to show you how words are broken, taking advantage of several key rules of our semantic system in order to do so. I consider this the bees knees.
The remainder of this post will be a linguistic analysis of how this process works. Maybe I’ll post a picture of a puppy at the end if things get too profound. Let’s start by looking at out first example from Mitchell’s translation:

1) Act without doing.

What the crap, right? You picturing an ancient Zen master spouting nonsense? Don’t worry, paradoxes like the one above are actually resolvable, and you probably started trying to figure it out as soon as you read it. It all comes down to an interesting set of semantic rules that in this case force us to create the meaning on our own. Bear with me for a minute.

Whenever we engage in conversation, we depend on a set of assumptions called Gricean Maxims to improve the quality, speed, and ease of communication. In Studies in the Ways of Words, Paul Grice talks about the Cooperation Principle, which basically states that speakers try their best to cooperate with one another by making statements appropriate to the current conversation. He broke this into four maxims we all follow (most of the time) in order to be understood:

The Maxim of Quantity- This rule tells us to give adequate information in our statements without too much information, depending on the context. If a co-worker asks how you’re doing in the hallway, the appropriate quantity of information is “Ok’. If your psychiatrist asks the same question in you session, you probably want to give a bit more info if you don’t want to waste your money.

The Maxim of Quality- This one tells us to tell the truth. Don’t say things you believe to be false, and to avoid unsubstantiated assertions.

The Maxim of Relation- This one tells us to stay relevant to the topic. Don’t wander or go off on tangents. My dad is literally incapable of following this one, and I’m not particularly good at following it myself.

The Maxims of Manner – This one tell us to be brief, clear, and orderly. We’re supposed to avoid ambiguous statements and obscure expressions.

The trick with all these rules is that we assume our speaker is following them until they give us a reason to decide they’re not. For example, when someone says “thanks a lot,” we’re able to figure out from context (you just offered them the empty wrapper of your candybar) and their intonation that they’re probably being sarcastic. That means they’re flouting the maxims of Quality (their comment is not literally true) and Manner (there was probably a more straightforward way to get their message across, perhaps an old-fashioned “screw you”).

So when we’re given an apparent paradox like, “Act without doing,” we automatically apply all the Maxims until we hit that initial wall of high-octane nonsense. Something doesn’t fit, so we have to figure out want the speaker is up to, what rules they are flouting. Given the context that the sentence is in an instructive text, we’ll assume they followed the maxims of Quantity (the statement is meant to be informative), Quality (the author believes his statement to be true), and Relation (it is a relevant tidbit of wisdom). But if we assume that these three qualities hold, and the statement still appears to be paradoxical, then the statement must fail to follow the Maxim of Manner (it is obscure or ambiguous).

Really? Ancient Chinese wisdom that’s deliberately obscure? Well allright, we’re going to have to go through a little mental gymnastics to figure things out then. I’ll get into the details of the process in next week’s installment…

(bet you can't wait)