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Notes on video lecture:
Laozi: He Who Speaks Does Not Know
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on October 20, 2016 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
overshadowing, tastes, Daoism, filial, frivolities, discrepancy, ritual, contradicts, steal, repulsive, language, Confucius, disruptive, judgements, lack, sincere, intuitions, distorts, benevolent, verbal, two, morality, anorexic, hypocrisy, negative, loyal, charity, amateurs, chaos, know, rate, primed, reality, suspect, Laozi, Daodejing
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Laozi: "He who speaks does not         "
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famous saying from the                   
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very easy to make satire of, since it                        itself
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but it maps to the suspicion of                 , since language can
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cut us off from our experience
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                 our experience in various ways
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a common theme in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi
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two foundational texts of             
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language can impair our ability to experience reality
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Daodejing
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language not only gets in the way but distorts our experience of               
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language damages our nature
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chapter 2
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"Everyone in the world knows that when the beautiful strives to be beautiful, it is                   "
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wei = striving
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when everyone calls that which is beautiful "beautiful", it becomes less beautiful
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you're setting up an ideal that his not the right ideal
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media presentations of beauty
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female body: tall,                  models
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society sets up an image that it pushes as beautiful
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beauty for Confucius
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we have crude natural tastes, we have to get trained up and we refine these over time
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beauty for Laozi
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natural tastes are fine
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Confucius is taking away from our basic                     , which are the right ones
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hedonistic treadmill
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social strife
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"no showing reverence for precious goods leads others not to           "
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danger of                   
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Confucianism is               
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talking about                  it just as bad as talking about beauty
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hypocritical social values destroy honest, natural relations between people
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calling someone benevolent impedes their ability to become                     
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a corrosive force in human nature
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when the Way was lost there was Virtue
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if you are talking about virtue, things are already messed up
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when virtue was lost there was benevolence
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when benevolence was lost there was righteousness
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when righteousness was lost there was             
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and rituals are the wearing thin of loyalty and trust, and the beginning of           
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Daodejing, Chapter 18
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"When the great Way is abandoned, there are benevolence and righteousness."
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you don't start talking about morality until morality is gone
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"When the six familial relationships are out of balance, there are kind parents and              children."
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when you have to talk about kind parents and filial children, this is a sign there are some that are not kind and filial
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when you really have it, you don't need to talk about it
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"When the state is in turmoil and chaos, there are            ministers."
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people don't call themselves loyal ministers unless they are not
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a real loyal minister doesn't have to talk about it
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healthy relationships don't need ceremony and you don't need to talk about it
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ritual scripts will turn people into hypocrites
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inhibits their ability to experience and live in a                relationship
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contemporary psychology
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moral licensing
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consciously considering yourself moral may impair actual moral behavior
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people were asked to meditate, and consider how compassionate they are, yet these were the people in the study who were more likely to spend money on                        for themselves
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one feels one is good and therefore can engage in bad
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experiment
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people were asked to donate $10 to a               
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people who were primed with normal words, would typically give $2.71 on the average
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people who were primed with words such as caring, generous, and kind, gave $1.07 on the average
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people              with words such as greedy, mean and selfish spent an average of $5.30
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verbal labels can
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be a smoke screen for the lack of the quality
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distort our experience with reality
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verbal                           
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consciously reflecting on our perceptions can have a negative effect on recalling experiences accurately
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Jonathan Schooler
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how language interacts with perception in a                  way
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when people try to talk about things that they really don't have good words for, this can be                     
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e.g. a face
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we don't have a good vocabulary to describe
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we can recognize them but not describe them well
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people who described the face afterward after the crime were less accurate in identifying the robber
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when you describe a face, it can reduce your ability to recognize it
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same with a color, shapes, voices,             
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reasons
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people          the vocabulary to describe e.g. the face in sufficient detail
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with experts who have the right vocabulary the effect was the opposite
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e.g. professional wine-tasters
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                 who tried to describe the wine they tasted afterward, showed a high rate of verbal overshadowing, whereas wine experts showed a modest gain in their ability to identify wines later, if they described them right after tasting them
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study: multiple face recognition
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participants were shown        faces and told to describe one of those faces
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verbalition interfered with both the face they had described as well as the face they hadn't described
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this suggests a generalized processing shift when people make              descriptions
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from a non-analytic mode to a more analytic mode
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study: not just memory but other non-verbal                     
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participants tried a number of jams
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some were asked to explain why they made that choice, other were asked not to explain it
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they were then asked to          the jams
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those who made verbal descriptions showed more of a                        with generally recognized high-quality jams and low-quality jams
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experts don't seem to be subject to verbal overshadowing
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reflection and verbalizing have a positive effect in accuracy of descriptions
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the experience of non-experts tend to support the view of           
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the experience of experts tend to support the view of                   
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training is important and leads to greater accuracy

Spelling Corrections:

annerexic ⇒ anorexic
frivolties ⇒ frivolities

Ideas and Concepts:

On the distorting power of language, via the Daodejing, from this morning's Ancient Chinese Philosophy class: "When you call that which is beautiful "beautiful", it becomes less beautiful."
Laozi on the path from intrinsic to extrinsic values, via this morning's Ancient Chinese Philosophy class: "When The Way was lost there was Virtue. When Virtue was lost there was Benevolence. When Benevolence was lost there was Righteousness. When Righteousness was lost there was Ritual."
On the importance of acquiring a rich vocabulary, via this morning's Ancient Chinese Philosophy class:

"Verbal overshadowing is a psychological phenomenon in which the act of describing our experiences can have a negative effect on recalling these experiences accurately at a later date.

Studies which have been done in this area show that this is particular true of recognizing faces. In an experiment where people are shown a video of a person committing a crime, those who are asked to write a description of the person's face directly after seeing the video, later were less likely to correctly identify the criminal.

The reason for this is that most people have a low vocabulary available to describe facial features in sufficient detail, and thus the process of using less-than-accurate words to write a description of the criminal's face, generally has the effective of inaccurately altering the person's memory of perceiving the criminal's face.

Further studies with wine experts, however, who have rich vocabularies to describe the experience of tasting wine were the opposite:While the control group of amateurs showed high rates of verbal overshadowing, wine experts with rich vocabularies to describe their experiences, showed modest gains in their ability to identify the wines that had tasted at a later date, if directly after tasting the wine, they expressed their experiences in writing."
The Definition of Religion
Mind/Body Dualism and Cognitive Control
Deontology, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics
Wu-Wei, Dao, Tien and De
The Shang Dynasty (1554-1045 BC)
The Beginnings of Written Chinese History
Eastern Holistic Thinking and the Paradox of Virtue
The Golden Age of the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE)
Philosophical and Conceptual Innovations in Zhou Thought
Confucius and the Analects
Confucius: I Transmit, I Do Not Innovate
Confucius' Use of Ritual as a Tool
Confucius' View on Learning vs. The Enlightenment
Confucius and Holistic Education
Confucius and the Art of Self-Cultivation
At Home in Virtue
Non-Coercive Comportment, Virtue, and Charisma of the Zhou
The Transition to Becoming Sincere
The Primitivists in the Analects
Laozi and the Daodejing
Laozi: Stop the Journey and Return Home
Laozi and The Desires of the Eye
Laozi: He Who Speaks Does Not Know
The Concept of Reversion
Laozi on Shutting Down the Prefrontal Cortex
The Guodian Laozi
Mozi and Materialist State Consequentialism
Mozi's Idea of Ideological Unity
Mozi's Doctrine of Impartial Caring
Mozi's Anti-Confucian Chapters
Mozi's Religious Fundamentalism and Organized Activism
The Language Crisis in the Warring States Period
Yang Zhu and Mid-Warring States' Focus on the Body