{"id":6766,"date":"2015-05-11T08:44:30","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T12:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6766"},"modified":"2015-05-11T23:37:54","modified_gmt":"2015-05-12T03:37:54","slug":"how-to-deny-a-questions-premise-in-one-easy-invention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6766","title":{"rendered":"How to Deny a Question&#8217;s Premise in One Easy Invention"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now that the <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/u\/0\/+PeterdaSilva\/posts\/SGbcXHhd1ay\">Universe Splitter<\/a> is out, it might be that a lot more people are going to trip over the word &#8220;mu&#8221; and wonder about it.  Or it might be the word only occurs in the G+ poll about Universe Splitter &#8211; I don&#8217;t know, I haven&#8217;t seen the app (which appears to be a pretty good joke about the many-wolds interpretation of quantum mechanics) itself.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, the most important thing to know about &#8220;mu&#8221; is that it is usually the correct answer to the question &#8220;Have you stopped beating your wife?&#8221;. More generally, it is a way of saying &#8220;Neither a yes or no would be a correct answer, because your question is incorrect&#8221;, <\/p>\n<p>But the history of how it got that meaning is also entertaining.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The word &#8220;mu&#8221; is originally Chinese, and is one of the ways of saying a simple &#8220;no&#8221; or &#8220;nothing&#8221; in that language.  It got its special meaning in English because was borrowed by Japanese and appears in translations of a Zen koan titled &#8220;Joshu&#8217;s Dog&#8221; from the collection called <cite>Gateless Gate<\/cite>.  To some (but not all) interpreters in the Zen school, the word &#8220;mu&#8221; in that koan is interpreted in a sense of denying the question.<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia will tell you this much, tracing the special question-denying sense of &#8220;mu&#8221; in English through Robert Pirsig&#8217;s <cite>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<\/cite> (1974) and  Douglas Hofstadter&#8217;s <cite>G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach<\/cite> (1979).<\/p>\n<p>However, Wikipedia&#8217;s account is incomplete in two respects.  First, it doesn&#8217;t report something I learned from the Japanese translator of <cite>The Cathedral and the Bazaar<\/cite>, which is that even educated speakers of modern Japanese are completely unaware of the question-denying use of &#8220;mu&#8221;. She reported that she had to learn it from me!<\/p>\n<p>Second, Wikipedia is missing one important vector of transmissions: Discordians, for whom &#8220;mu&#8221; seems to have have had its question-denying sense before 1970 (the date of the 4th edition of <cite>Principia Discordia<\/cite>) and from whom Pirsig and Hofstadter may have picked up the word. I suspect most contemporary usage traces through the hacker culture to the Discordians, either directly or through Hofstadter.<\/p>\n<p>Regardless, it&#8217;s a useful word which deserves more currency.  Sacred Chao says &#8220;Mu!&#8221; and so should you, early and often!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that the Universe Splitter is out, it might be that a lot more people are going to trip over the word &#8220;mu&#8221; and wonder about it. Or it might be the word only occurs in the G+ poll about Universe Splitter &#8211; I don&#8217;t know, I haven&#8217;t seen the app (which appears to be&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6766\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How to Deny a Question&#8217;s Premise in One Easy Invention<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6766"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6769,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6766\/revisions\/6769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}