 Adopting readings 2 or 3 doesn’t remove all paradox from Laozi’s position. Laozi is still left with his variation on Shen Dao’s “abandon knowledge.” The text, however, does develop a different motivation for it. We find few traces of Shen Dao’s fatalistic or stoic reasoning. Laozi’s opposition to knowledge derives more from Song Xing’s insights about how social knowledge shapes our values and desires. We can attribute to the Laozi the next development in Chinese pragmatics of language, how language shapes action.