The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal).

At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against).

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Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone.

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As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities.

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I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!

native Americans or Native Americans? the latter would be more like the Moriori and fit the context better, but somehow native English speakers who arent interlegible are also interesting.

Western culture is predicated on a sort of positivist metaphysics, and our language reflects that. Whereas in the east, the langauges and cultures have both long ago (as in, thousands of years ago) assimilated the precepts of non-dualism, which brings with it a greater degree of subtlety, through its embedded understanding of equanimity, dependent arising, and so on. It's a different ontological root, and therefore a different schema altogether.

Knowing what I know of you guys in NZ, a lot of that sort of thinking has made its way into popular understanding by way of encounters with the Maori people, and some of it has to do with more modern notions of pluralism, and some of it has to do with British politeness.

All that to say, it is not your fault nor the Americans fault that there's a gap in understanding. It's the byproduct of where those two schemas do not connect.

The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. No language is more expressive than another, some are more expressive for particular very specific things, like Inuit languages might be much better at describing the varieties of snow, but no language has a monopoly on describing dualism of ideas. It's just as silly to be overly dismissive of the language you're familiar with as it is to be overly dismissive of others.

> I've not been able to communicate what I mean

As a native Chinese speaker that's always my confusion when communicate in English as I would feel that the word/phrasing can not express the meaning in my heart.

I made my own top level comment below about the ambiguity of "I don't want x" and how hard it is in English to distinguish between "I have zero want for x" and "I have negative want for x"

I didn't know about semiotic square, and appreciate learning about it. It points at exactly the property that I keep tripping over (and seeing others trip over).

Given that wants are an expression of values, and understanding other people's values enables empathy, I can't help but think this flaw in language is actually inhibiting empathy and cooperation at larger scales.

Ever read Plato?

Agreed. The flaw seems to be subtle though, a kinda sorta mismatch between intuition and deliberation (intent?) [0]

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314666472_The_Exact...

[0] by which I mean people prefer to use intuition when thinking on their own, but prefer others to be deliberate -- however inappropriate levels of intent also provokes suspicion?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00320-8

Personally, I feel that jokes have the potential to cut through all that (barriers to empathy)

How about tripartism of ideas?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08886...

https://www.academia.edu/45462252/The_Logic_Structure_of_Tao...

Okay, these are probably posthoc retcons

> The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome.

The author did not say this; this is your unnecessarily negative take. However the author is comparing Chinese with English where this is somewhat true and well studied; eg. A Comparison of Chinese and English Language Processing - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/bookseries/abs... Google will give you lots more info. on this.

> No language is more expressive than another,

Objectively false. This is the same meaningless logic that since almost all programming languages are Turing Complete and can simulate any Turing Machine therefore they are equivalent. In a abstract sense they are but for all practical purposes the notion is useless as anybody trying to program in C++ vs. Haskell vs. Prolog will tell you. This is why you have the concept of "Paradigms" and "Worldviews".

Every culture imposes a "Philosophical Worldview" on the Languages it invents.

An ancient Indian Philosopher named Bhartṛhari (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhart%E1%B9%9Bhari) actually founded a school of philosophy where language is linked to cognition-by-itself with cognition-of-content i.e. subject+object+communication as a "whole understanding". He called this Sphota (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spho%E1%B9%ADa) defined as "bursting forth" of meaning or idea on the mind as language is uttered. This is the reason why in ancient Sanskrit literature there is so much emphasis on oral tradition i.e. using right words, right utterances, right tones etc.

Previous discussion Words for the Heart: A treasury of emotions from classical India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249766

Also see the book The Word and the World: India's Contribution to the Study of Language by Bimal Krishna Matilal which gives an overview of Bhartrhari's (and others) ideas - https://archive.org/details/wordandtheworldindiascontributio...

Indeed but we have veered far from Plato's school of thought ever since the dualism of Descartes and it was further reinforced by the rise in materialism following the "death of god" and the discovery of the atom.

Thank you. Exactly the frame of reference I was speaking from.

I've just noticed this hierarchal tripartism so I'm happy to see that other people have retconned it too.

See also the psychologist Richard Nisbett's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_E._Nisbett) works specifically;

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Thought

I hear you on that, but it's not like Laozi's thought is particularly useful to Chinese capitalism, either. Certainly any remnant gestures towards the dialectics of Marx by the CCP are farcical. We can allow for some local variance, of course, while still seeing the vulgarization of the whole world, so to speak. I think it's important to appreciate that the seed of dialectical thought can never be vanquished; Kant accidentally paved the way for Hegel's abolition of Cartesian dualism, and Hegel had no problem making use of the German language, so seemingly divorced from Plato's Greek, to do that. Dialectical thought can't help but appear over and over again, no matter the language, because all language is a product of the real world.

Again, it would be a mistake to not afford some degree of autonomy to language. The question is to what degree language is free to structure the world. Ultimately any language, I believe, can be expanded to express whatever new ideas arise in society, so that it is the real conditions that have ultimate power "in the last instance".