Logic in China (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy).pdf

Logic in China

Technically, classical China had semantic theory but no logic. Western historians, confusing logic and theory of

language, used the term ‘logicians’ to describe those philosophers whom the Chinese called the ‘name school’.

The best known of these were Hui Shi (380-305 BC ) and Gongsun Lung (b. 380 BC ?). This group now also includes

the Later Mohists and the term ‘distinction school’ (translated as ‘dialecticians’) has become common.

The importance of the more detailed Mohist work came to light in modern times. The Confucian tradition had lost

access to it. Rescuing that text rekindled a long-lost interest in Chinese theories of language. The restored Mohist

texts give us a general theory of how words work. A term picks out part of reality. Some terms are more general

than others; terms like ‘dobbin’ or ‘horse’ or ‘object’ might pick out the same thing. When we use a term to pick

something out, we commit ourselves to using the name to pick out similar things and ‘stopping’ with the dissimilar.

Thus, for each term we learn an ‘is this’ and an ‘is not’. ‘Is not’ generates an opposite for each name and marks

the point of distinction or discrimination.

Chinese doctrine portrays disagreements as arising from different ways of making the distinctions that give rise to

opposites. The word bian (distinction/dispute) thus came to stand for a philosophical dispute. The Mohists argued

that, in a ‘distinction/dispute’, one party will always be right. For any descriptive term, the thing in question will

either be an ‘is this’ or an ‘is not’.

Mohists were realistic about descriptions and the world. Real similarities and differences underlie our language.

They rejected the claim that words distort reality; to regard all language as ‘perverse’, they noted, was ‘perverse’.

The Mohists failed, however, to give a good account of what similarities and differences should count in making a

distinction. Mohists also found that combining terms was semantically fickle. In the simplest case, the compound

picked out the sum of what the individual terms did. Classical Chinese lacked pluralization so ‘cat-dog’ works like

‘cats and dogs’. Other compound terms (such as ‘white horse’) worked as they do in English. The confusion led

Gongsun Long to argue, on Confucian grounds, that we could say ‘white horse is not horse’.

Confucius’ linguistics centred on his proposal to ‘rectify names’. Confucius used a code with fixed formulations,

and therefore tended to treat moral problems as turning on which terms we use in stating them. The abortion

dispute illustrates this well. Both sides agree to the rule ‘do not kill an innocent person’: the dispute becomes one

of whether to use the term ‘person’ or ‘foetus’. In contrast, Mohists argued that we should not alter normal term

use to get moral results. We simply accept that guiding compounds may not follow normal use. A thief is a person,

but killing a thief (executing) is not killing a person (murdering).

These results bolstered Daoist scepticism about words. We never will fashion a ‘constant’ dao. According to

Zhuangzi, even a realistic theory of language (like that of the Mohists) will not give constant guidance. He drew

from Hui Shi’s approach to language, which emphasized relative terms such as ‘large’ and ‘small’. We may talk of

a large horse (relative to other horses) or a large horsefly (relative to other flies), but ‘large’ itself has no constant

standard of comparison. From the premise, ‘all such distinctions are relative’, Hui Shi fallaciously concluded that

‘reality has no distinctions in itself’. Zhuangzi rejected this conclusion and ridiculed Hui Shi’s monism. If we say

‘everything is one’, then our language attempts to ‘point to’ everything. If it succeeds, then in addition to the

‘one-everything’ there is the reference to it. That makes two. The whole consisting of everything and saying so

then makes three. Referring to that whole makes four, and the fact that we have referred to it makes five, and so

on.

Zhuangzi shifted Hui Shi’s focus slightly, and concentrated on ‘this’ and ‘that’. These do refer to things, but each

use is different. Language, he argued, is not fixed on the world but on our relationships with it. Each existing

language (different ways of making guiding distinctions) is equally natural. Human debate is as natural as the

chirping of birds. We cannot appeal to nature to settle our disputes about ethics. The standards are not constant;

they are historical, variable and diverse in different moral communities.

Distinctions are real, but we can never know if we have found the right ones. Zhuangzi accepts a real world in

which language works. Thus, he celebrates the endless possible ways of distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘not-this’. Some

alternatives will certainly work better (assuming our present values) than the one we have now. The problem is

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that any standard we could use to decide about that would itself be controversial.

The final word came from Xunzi and his student Han Feizi. The former, a Confucian, understood Zhuangzi’s

arguments to show that the only standard of correct usage must be convention itself. Thus he renewed Confucian

tradition and promoted it politically as the only viable and valid conventional system. He advocated government

suppression of dissenting voices who ‘confuse language’ and ‘create new terms’. In the end, only the ruler may

change language (and then only the ‘descriptive’ terms). The standards of social assent and dissent come from the

Confucian ‘sage-kings’. We must adhere to these as the only acceptable ideals; the alternative is anarchy in moral

discourse and, consequently, in society.

Han Feizi, seized on Xunzi’s attitude toward coercion while discarding the appeal to ancient tradition. Han Feizi

had considerable influence on the draconian Qin emperor who ruthlessly carried out his injunction to stamp out

philosophical disputes about ethics. This brought the rich tradition of creative philosophy to an abrupt end;

religious thought and scholasticism dominated the rest of Chinese intellectual history.

1 Confucius: rectifying names

To understand the development of theory of language, we must place it in the context of Chinese ethical thought.

The central focus of ethical dispute was about dao , or ‘guiding discourse’ (see Confucian philosophy, Chinese

§2 ). Confucius championed the historical ‘guiding discourse’ of the sage-kings, and purportedly studied it in the

ancient documents that formed the curriculum of his school. The Liji (Book of Rites) is the paradigm for

Confucius’ conception of ethics.

Confucius’ semantic framework was the relation between language and action, not between language and objects

or reality. The implicit role of language was prescriptive rather than descriptive. Confucius, oblivious to ethical

criticism of his discourse-based guide, addressed mainly problems in practical interpretation. His theory implied a

pragmatic relation between language and objects. In order for a discourse to guide us, we must correctly pin names

on the world’s ‘stuff’.

Confucius argued for imitation as the way to achieve this. Social leaders model the proper use of names in publicly

practising the ‘ritual’; the people learn from these examples and are then able to follow the code as it applies to

them. Confucius called this ‘rectifying names’, and treated it as the key to good government:

Zilu said, ‘The ruler of Wei awaits your taking on administration. What would be Master’s priority?’ The

Master replied, ‘Certainly - rectifying names!’ … If names are not rectified then language will not flow. If

language does not flow, then affairs cannot be completed. If affairs are not completed, ritual and music will not

flourish. If ritual and music do not flourish, punishments and penalties will miss their mark. When punishments

and penalties miss their mark, people lack the wherewithal to control hand and foot. Hence a gentleman’s

words must be acceptable to vocalize and his language must be acceptable as action. A gentleman’s language

lacks anything that misleads - period.

( Analects 13:3)

The strategy of setting examples threatens a regress unless someone in the chain of models knows what example to

set in some other way. Stopping the regress pushes Confucianism toward intuitionism. Confucius seemed to regard

a mysterious quality, ren (humanity), as the key to correct practical interpretation of the li (ritual). ‘Humanity’ is a

moral insight that guides the attribution of terms in following circumstances.

One does not rectify by consulting definitions: no Chinese accounts of language generate or point to anything like

the concept ‘meaning’. The model of the language-world relation is political. Social authorities tag things for

ethical purposes. This tagging facilitates guiding discourse. Two theories of Confucian tagging emerge: one

determined by traditional training and one by innate moral intuition.

Classical Chinese grammar reflects this model of language-world relations in its topic-comment structure. In the

place of sentences, literary Chinese makes ‘comments’ on contextually indexed ‘stuff’. Classical sentences

required no subject. Language appeared as far more context dependent than in modern Western thought, with its

focus on the subject-predicate sentence and ‘complete thought’.

Implicit cognitive theory also mirrored this topic-comment structure. Western philosophy focused on propositional

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)

belief, a mental state that represents a fact, and knowledge. However, ancient Chinese grammar had neither

propositional belief nor knowledge structures. Chinese grammar suggests a person tending to deem some real

object ( X ) as P (the comment). Knowing is correctly deeming or assigning P to X (or knowing X ’s being deemed

P ). Literary Chinese used adjectives, one-place verbs and even nouns as two-place predicates in situations where

we would use propositional belief structures: one P ’s some X . An alternative structure uses the Daoist concept of

wei (‘deem-act’, the wei of wuwei , ‘lack deeming action’). One, with regard to X , ‘deems-acts’ it P .

For these reasons (along with the absence of functional inflection, an ideographic conception of writing and the

close grammatical similarity of proper and common nouns, adjectives and even verbs), Chinese linguistic theory

focused on the question of what term to assign to things rather than on the propositional units so central to Western

theory of language and logic (see Language, philosophy of ). The dominant conception was that a word had a scope

or range of application, rather than that of referring to individuals or objects. This tendency reflects the fact that

Chinese nouns resemble mass-nouns in having cumulative reference, in lacking both grammatical number and

articles, and in being associated with various ways of individuating. The use of sortals for individuation became

regularized for Chinese nouns at the end of the classical period.

2 Mozi: language utilitarianism

The natural development of this model in Mozi’s early work (and the subsequent elaboration in later Mohism)

focuses on bian (distinction/dispute) (see Mohist philosophy ; Mozi ). A term’s use involves an ‘is this/right’ ( shi )

and an ‘is not this/wrong’ ( fei ). To learn the term is to learn to ‘is this/is not this’ appropriately with it. Mozi

argued that society should use the pre-conventional or natural ‘will’ toward benefit (and against harm). This

contrast guides the assignment of ‘is this/is not this’ to words used in social discourse. This interpretive proposal

flowed imperceptibly into a proposal to order guiding dialogues differently, to change Confucius’ traditional

‘guiding discourse’.

The clearest example is Mozi’s argument about spirits and fate. General utility dictates that social discourse should

include the string ‘lack spirits’ and ‘have spirits’. He represents this conclusion as an example of knowing the dao

of you-wu (have-lack) (see You-wu ). That means making a ‘is this/is not this’ ( li-hai ) distinction for each of these

terms using the standard of ‘benefit-harm’. We use either ‘have’ or ‘lack’ of things when so doing will lead to

general utility.

The implication was initially anti-realistic. Mozi advocated three standards of language use. The first recognized

the historical, conventional aspect of language. Language should conform to the guidance intentions of the ancient

sage-kings. Second, language standards should be applicable by ordinary people using their ‘eyes and ears’.

Mozi’s favourite examples of fa (standards) are measurements: a plumb line, a compass, a square and stakes for

plotting where the sun rises and sets (see Fa ). Finally, we should use words in ways that maximize general utility.

For Mozi, these standards pull in essentially the same direction. He assumed the people’s good motivated the sage

kings and he repeatedly likened the ‘will of nature’ to an objective utility measurement.

These standards govern the content and practice of discourse, regulations, injunctions, maxims and slogans.

Including any string in the approved discourse was ‘making it constant’. The ideal was a discourse dao that could

consistently (reliably) and correctly (objectively) guide society. Mozi identified that dao as the one that resulted in

the greatest utility for the country and its people. Thus, description or assignment of names is a handmaiden to

ethics.

To count as the constant dao , Mozi’s ‘benefit harm’ standard must itself be ‘constant’; it should be a reliable,

unambiguous and objectively correct, unchanging standard. He argued that in fact it was, since it came from tian

(nature) rather than from society, convention or contingent history (see Tian ).

Mozi’s attack on conventional guiding discourse led Mencius to defend Confucianism by postulating an innate

moral intuition. Mencius argued that language should not manipulate or guide human action. Guidance should only

come from the innate patterns or dispositions in the heart-mind; these include an innate ability to ‘is this/is not

this’ (see Xin (heart-and-mind) ). The heart-mind selects the appropriate ‘is this/is not this’ assignment and thus the

appropriate action in real contexts. Society should not distort or reshape those natural moral inclinations. Mencius

believed that, left to itself, everyone’s heart-mind would innately select the ‘correct’ action for them.

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Laozi pointed in a similar direction but undermined Mencius’ optimism. Indeed, we should resist the conventional

socialization that comes with language. Learning names both constrains natural spontaneity and creates new and

disruptive competitive desires. However, Laozi portrayed natural behaviour as being much more ‘primitive’ than

did Mencius. The realm of social concern would extend no further than the local agrarian village. Laozi also

emphasized the anti-language aspect of intuitive guidance more than did Mencius. He hinted that Mencius’ idea

that some particular moral values were intuitive or innate was a result of confusing the unconscious result of

learning a guiding language with innate intuition. Learning names involves training in how to make distinctions

and how to ‘desire’ with them. The names, distinctions, desires and actions are linked distortions of natural

spontaneity. Laozi’s conclusion is his opening line: no guidance in discourse form is constant (see Daoist

philosophy §2 ).

3 Rediscovery of later Mohist theory

Before discussing the later Mohists, let us glance at the textual explanation of the loss and recovery of the Mohist

Canons. The current ‘best’ textual theory says the Mohists wrote two ‘Canons’ (I and II). Each consisted of a

series of short maxims; the first half of each Canon was written vertically across the top of a standard-sized book

of bamboo strips, and the second half on the bottom. The terse analytic theorems were then keyed to another

bamboo book containing longer explanations, examples or arguments for them. The second set of bamboo books

was indexed by putting the first character of the claim alongside the first character of the explanation.

When scribes later copied each strip of the canons straight through, they turned this clever system into a puzzle.

With no understanding of linguistic theory, they treated the whole corpus as a set of consecutive essays. Since

classical Chinese had no punctuation or grammatical inflection, this textual disaster obscured the slogans, jumbled

the order and shrouded the indexing principle. The scribes absorbed the indexing character as part of the text of the

now orphaned explications.

Given the philosophical sophistication and difficulty of the text, the Mohist school’s obliteration at the beginning

of China’s philosophical Dark Age (roughly 200 BC -1000 AD ) and the placement of the Canons in the middle of the

most vociferous anti-Confucian classical text, the medieval Confucian orthodoxy had little motivation to tackle the

puzzle until the late Qing dynasty. Sun Yirang (1848-1908) found the essential clue to unzipping and analysing the

content in a phrase in the middle which read, ‘read these horizontally’. Other Chinese scholars tried different

reconstructions and this work still goes on. Angus Graham’s Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science first delivered

a version of the reconstructed text to Western sinologists in 1978 (Graham 1978 ).

As his title suggests, Graham shared the common view that the subject matter was logic. He assumed Mohists

intended the text as a deductively connected set of definitions and propositions. The statements, however, do not

resemble definitions. Genus-species form is infrequent and the slogans fit into a theory of use, not of meaning.

They are far from forming a deductive set. Still, Graham’s assumption guided his reconstruction in ways that made

the content accessible to analysis. Many problems and obscurities remain, but Graham’s reconstruction reveals a

systematic and reasonably coherent theory of language.

The maxims do deal with central philosophical concepts and, like Chinese dictionaries, frequently give lists of

substitution characters or a range of examples. Some slogans are metaphors which the explications exploit; others

are helpful ways of re-thinking and reflecting on a familiar concept. In addition to theory of language, intelligible

sections of the Canon present fragments of epistemological, geometrical, optical and economic theory.

4 Later Mohists: names and distinctions

The School of Names was technically not a school (see Mohist philosophy §5 ). Traditional scholars gave the name

to individual thinkers who analysed names in conflicting ways; their motivations reflect the differing trends in

pre-analytic political thinking. The later Mohists developed Mozi’s pragmatic, reality-based approach to naming.

Gongsun Long defended the Confucian ideal of an unambiguous guiding scheme of names (the one produced by

rectifying names). This principle, he presumed, dictated a goal of one-name-one-thing. Hui Shi raised sceptical

problems designed to show that language ‘constancy’ across all situations was impossible (a Daoist conclusion).

The later Mohists spoke of four ‘objects’ of zhi (knowing): names, ‘stuff’, union and deeming-action (see Zhi ).

Mozi used an example that helps us fix the relevant concept of ‘knowing’. Blind people can ‘know-to’ produce

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)

utterances like ‘black like coal’ or ‘white as snow’ but cannot distinguish things when placed in front of them.

They know names, but not ‘stuff’ or union. Thus they cannot use the names to guide their actions.

The Mohists, as we noted above, lacked a doctrine of ‘belief’. ‘Knowing union’ meant competently assigning

terms and descriptions to objects. The Mohists accepted that ‘knowing names’ was conventional knowledge. They

stressed, however, that we apply conventions to an external reality, known independently of language. The goal of

knowledge remained practical guidance, not representation or picturing. Once conventionally attached to some

reality, the inherent similarities and differences determined a term’s application. Conventions presuppose a

world-guided way to mark distinctions. Mohists portray name-object relations mereologically: a name applies to a

scattered reality determined by tong-yi (same-different).

The Mohist terms for ‘reference’ - ju (pick out) and qu (choose) - had a practical tone. A name picks out some

‘stuff’ from the background. Convention determines which similarities and differences mark the boundary between

shi (‘is this’, what a name picks out) and fei (‘is not this’, what it excludes). In using a name, we commit ourselves

to go to some real limit and then stop.

The Mohists argued against the one-name-one-reality principle of rectifying names. Names, the Mohists argued,

could be very general (like ‘thing’ itself), or based on similarity classes (like ‘horse’) or applied to only one thing

(like ‘John’). They saw no objection in principle to having overlapping scopes and even two names for the same

thing (like ‘puppy’ and ‘dog’).

Elaboration and defence of this account of bian (distinction) led to complications. How should we expand the

account to explain what a string of two ming (‘names’, characters) picks out? The model used was the string

niu-ma (ox-horse). The Mohist took this to pick out a compound stuff, the sum of the range of the two component

terms (‘draft animals’). They called the unit a jian (whole) and its parts ti (substantive parts). This analysis of

compounds made them analogous to general terms. However, this treatment raised several questions. In what sense

is a compound really two things? Could we not view anything as a compound of more basic stuffs? Is there any

fundamental kind of ‘substantive part’?

These questions lead to another: are there any basic tong-yi (same-different)? The Mohists gave no clear answer.

They noticed many senses in which things can be ‘same - different’; some realities might be different only in being

called by different names. Being ‘two’ was necessarily differentiated even though called by one name. Realities

could also be the same in the sense of being included in some compound object. Conversely, they could be

different in not being included in some ‘substantial part’: they could be the same or different in being in the same

place or not, and finally they could be same or different in belonging to the same lei (kind) (see Mohist philosophy

§5 ).

However, the Mohists analysed lei in a loose way. Having that with which tong (same) was the criteria of being

tonglei (same kind). Not having ‘same’ was the criteria of not being of a ‘kind’. Although they might initially have

intended to limit ‘kind’ to natural kinds, the account generalized it to almost any similarity based grouping of

stuffs. Thus the Mohists could refer to oxen and horses as the same ‘kind’. The only clear examples of not-‘kind’

are things so unlike they are not comparable. ‘Which is longer, wood or night?’ they suggest, is an unintelligible

question because it compares two different ‘kinds’.

The looseness of this account of classifying buttressed the sceptic’s position (see §§8-9) that the world offered no

reliable basis for fundamental distinctions. The Mohists seemed vaguely aware of the difficulty and did condemn

kuangju (‘wild picking out’, where we use irrelevant ‘same’ or ‘different’ to classify or distinguish). They gave no

account, however, of what marks a ‘wild’ or irrelevant way of grouping ‘stuff’.

5 Semantic paradoxes and compound terms

The central term of assessment in the Mohist study was ke (assertible). They used it in several related ways. An

expression may be described as ‘assertible’ of some object. If this object is introduced by another term, then

‘assertible’ became a way of exploring semantic relations between terms (see Semantics ). Mohists asked whether

we can sometimes, always or never describe things picked out by term X as Y .

The analysis, although in terms of assertibility rather than truth, yielded a familiar and important conclusion

against certain forms of relativism (see Relativism ). The Mohists argued that in any dispute involving

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