Effing the Ineffable

Crispin Sartwell's translation of the Tao Te Ching is breathtaking, equal parts playful and meditative. His version of the first passage has left me gasping for air for six months now, and certainly leads me to believe that Lao Tzu (or Lao Tse, or however you prefer to transliterate it) was a philosopher much more than a mystic.

1

This book can tell you nothing;
the Tao leaves you where you began.
A maiden can leave things nameless;
a mother must name her children.
Perfectly empty or carrying ten thousand words, you still return,
and return, and return.
Naming things loses what unites them.
Failing to name things loses them into what unites them.
Words are limits that make experience possible.
But form and formlessness are the same.
Tao and the world are the same,
though we call them by different names.
This unity is dark and deep, but on the other hand it is deep and dark.
It opens into the center of everything.

The segments above in bold strike me as eminent maxims about reasoning. Lao Tzu (or, perhaps, Lao Sart, given how each translator colors the Tao Te Ching) is talking about abstraction.

The Academic Straw Man of Heraclitus and the sorites paradox establish that when we say 'A,' there is no hard and fast 'A.' This, to me, does not undermine the Law of Identity or any structured approach to reasoning. We are simply shown the necessity of abstractions.

If we see a heap of sand, it is impractical to have a hard-and-fast definition of "heapness." If we decide that 10,000 grains exactly makes a heap, and any collection of grains less than 10,000 isn't a heap, how is this practical? We'd have to count each heap. Likewise, we draw distinctions in color, but some cultures draw them differently (counting blue and green as one color, for instance, or making sky blue and navy blue separate colors, not simply shades of blue).

Any abstraction may be artificial, but where would we be without abstraction? As Lao Sart has it, a maiden has nothing to name, but a mother must name her children.

Words are limits that make experience possible.
But form and formlessness are the same.

As a firm adherent of the Law of Identity, that last line may seem problematic. However, Wittgenstein reminded us that we cannot speak objects, we can only speak about objects. The word "cow" is not the same as the actual thing. But we use the abstraction "cow" to cover a similar set of things in order to speak about our experiences. In the end, however, form and formlessness are the same. The animal is the same whether we call it "cow," "vaca," "kluthoolang," what have you. The idea that words can change the reality they describe, save in matters of grammar or literature, belongs to magick, not logic.

In language, we are effing the ineffable, so to speak.

This may have bearing on my last post, because while bored at a meeting I generated some additional paradoxes.

(1) This sentence is meaningless.

(2) "Is meaningless when preceded by its quotation" is meaningless when preceded by its quotation.

(3) This sentence is meaningless at all levels of metalanguage.

Of course, (2) is a nod to Quine's paradox, which states:

(4) "Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

For my part, (2) was designed to deal with the objection (mine, idly) that the solution to this Revenge Liar might lie in uncovering the meaning of the word "this." And it still might, because (2) still seems to contain self-reference, even if "this" does not appear.

Meanwhile, (3) is designed to raise the issue of Tarski's conception of metalanguages, that is, the idea of "'This cat is brown' is true."

For a while yesterday I mused that the solution may be to forbid sentences to comment on themselves (save for their basic act of assertion, which claims truth), but then this came to mind:

(5) This sentence has five words.

Clearly, (5) comments on nothing but itself. However, it's easy to see if it's true. If it had claimed to have six words, it clearly would have been false.

Now, let's imagine I said the following:

(6) "This sentence has five words" is meaningful.

This seems fine. As long as the statement affirmed or denied, it has meaning. We can take this further:

(7) "'This sentence has five words' is meaningful" is meaningful.

Once again, we can trace it down to a basic assertion that can be affirmed or denied.

But what of (1)? What is the basic assertion? That it is meaningless. And so it seems to be - it asserts nothing.

However, the kicker is that if it is indeed meaningless, then the sentence is accurate. So it can't be meaningless; it must be true. But if it's true, what it affirms is that it lacks meaning! Square One, it seems. Or a round square, even more frightening (I'd like round square coasters, to set next to the wormhole in my kitchen).

This may be a good place to raise my thoughts on considering, conceiving, and demonstrating statements.

As far as I can currently reckon it, there are six options for a statement.

First, it is either considerable or inconsiderable. Meaning, it can be discussed, or it cannot. There is no moral imperative here, nothing of "polite conversation." What I mean is that a statement can either enter the imagination, or it cannot. If it is considerable, it may be contradictory. For instance, we can discuss "This cat is both brown and in no way brown." We can consider it. However, anything inconsiderable will forever be out of our grasp. The concept of "inconsiderable statements" is considerable, but nothing in that genus is within our imaginations, or ever will be. Its corner of Idea Space is forever closed to us, and we cannot even find the gate that's so firmly shut!

The next level involves a statement being conceivable or inconceivable. We cannot conceive of a cat that is both brown and in no way, shape, form, time, manner, etc., brown. So it is considerable, but inconceivable.

However, if I had said "There exists a neon pink crow with a lightbulb glued to its head living in Boston," (poor thing!) we can consider and conceive such a thing. We can form a picture.

The last stage is whether a statement is demonstrable or indemonstrable. If demonstrable, we can confirm it with our sense data, not merely picture it. There may be no such crow in Boston, or there may be. We may be able to create it ourselves (I hope not!).



A very poor solution is that any of these paradoxes belong to both S and ~C.

I'll have to dwell on this a bit more. There's much I'm missing, I'm sure.