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In traditional logical and semantic systems, contradiction is often seen as something to be eliminated — a signal that the reasoning process has gone wrong.

But what if contradiction is a structural feature of how meaning is compressed and expanded — akin to the way duality in Taoist Taiji reflects two interdependent poles that form a stable whole?

Some speculative models in logic and AI (including one I’m working on) explore this view by treating contradiction as a folded state of semantic tension, not an error. There are also parallels in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, dialectics, and perhaps in paraconsistent logic.

My question is: Are there formal or philosophical frameworks that support the idea of contradiction as a generative or structural element of meaning — rather than a breakdown?

Any pointers to paraconsistent logic, Taoist philosophy applied to logic, or similar work would be appreciated.

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  • See Deleuze's The Logic of Sense (1969): "an exploration of meaning and meaninglessness or "commonsense" and "nonsense" through metaphysics, epistemology, grammar, and eventually psychoanalysis. [it] consists of a series of thirty-four paradoxes".
    – Mauro ALLEGRANZA
    Commented Jun 17 at 12:42
  • From the traditions of analytic philosophy of language, it's hard to see how a metasemantic theory could emerge from "Taiji-style duality and geometric folding". Geometry and our visual apparatus, and I claim no famiarity with Taiji duality, do not form the basis of cognition broad enough to comport with Chomsky's UG for instance, or be functional enough to provide enough explanation for various domains of semantics in linguistics, mathematical logic, or computer science, all of which study languages in depth. In fact, taiji appears to be little more than numerology...
    – J D
    Commented Jun 17 at 15:22
  • or an early philosophical framework on par with Thales, Parmenides, or Heraclitus. As such, it wouldn't meet the bar for serious philosophy by professional philosophers in the analytic or Continental traditions as it seems to be based on pseudoscientific thinking perhaps on par with astrology or Freudian analysis. Thus, my VTC, sorry!
    – J D
    Commented Jun 17 at 15:23
  • Thanks for both the suggestions and critiques — I truly appreciate the engagement. To clarify: Taiji here is not meant as mystical numerology, but as a structural metaphor for recursive duality, inversion, and semantic tension — concepts that already show up in logic systems (e.g., negation), machine learning (adversarial training), and even physics (wave-particle duality). I'm not rejecting symbolic reasoning frameworks like UG or formal semantics — rather, I'm exploring whether a meta-semantic layer can describe how meaning compresses, folds, or collapses across contexts.
    – PSBigBig
    Commented Jun 18 at 5:38
  • This approach isn’t offered as doctrine, but as a speculative scaffold — a way to test whether contradiction itself can become an information-bearing structure. My project, WFGY, attempts to formalize some of these principles in an open-source reasoning kernel. It’s not trying to replace existing paradigms, but to provide a complementary frame for understanding how meaning fails, rebounds, or heals. You're welcome to take a look if curious: ?? github.com/onestardao/WFGY Feedback — critical or constructive — is always appreciated. ??
    – PSBigBig
    Commented Jun 18 at 5:38

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