Abstract
Scholars have defended a range of interpretations of the place of truth in early Chinese thought, from the view that pre-Han philosophy has no concept of semantic truth to the view that it has several concepts with roles overlapping those of truth, to the view that early Chinese thinkers actually offer theories of truth. Examining how pre-Han philosophers thought about truth may help us better understand the discursive framework and intellectual orientation of early Chinese philosophy. In particular, it may illustrate how pre-Han inquiries into logic, language, knowledge, and metaphysics tended to focus on questions concerning the proper dao (way) of conduct and its relation to the course of the natural world. This chapter first reviews the long-standing debate in the scholarly literature over whether truth has any role at all in pre-Han thought. Next, it considers how we might effectively and informatively frame inquiry into the topic of truth in Chinese philosophy. It then offers concise interpretations of several concepts in pre-Han texts with conceptual roles overlapping that of truth.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For a detailed account, along with an overview of major themes in early Chinese philosophy of language and logic, see (Fraser 2016).
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- 6.
These studies follow in the footsteps of Chmielweski’s pioneering study in English of the evaluation of assertions in the later Mohist texts. See, e.g., (Chmielweski 1966: 36, 41–46).
- 7.
An assertion is a speech act by means of which a speaker claims that some fact holds, whereas a sentence is not a speech act but a grammatical unit that can be used to perform a speech act. For the purposes of this discussion, I will set aside the question of whether it is sentences or propositions that should be regarded as the bearers of truth values. The point is simply that many sentence types, such as “The cat is on the mat,” are not associated with a truth value. Rather, particular tokens of such sentences take on a truth value when asserted in some context.
- 8.
I have in mind here the Mohist “Condemning Fate” essays (Mozi books 35–37), the Later Mohist dialectical writings (Mozi books 40–45), the Xunzi “Correct Names” and “Correct Discourse” essays (Xunzi books 21–22), and the major essays on language in The Annals of Lü Buwei (see Knoblock and Riegel 2000, sections 16/8, 17/1, 18/4, and 18/5, for example).
- 9.
Early texts on language treat all words as various kinds of “names” (ming 名). “Statements” (yan 言) and “expressions” (ci 辭) are regarded as combinations of names used to express a single thought or intention. “Explanations” (shuo 說) or “expositions” (yi 議) are longer pieces of discourse that present the reasons for something. Names refer to “stuff” or “objects” (shi 實), which include both physical objects and situations or states of affairs.
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McLeod rejects this characterization, but the strained interpretations he offers as evidence of purported early Chinese theories of truth tend to reinforce it (McLeod 2015).
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See Graham (1989: 395), Harbsmeier (1998: 201), Robins (2010: 46), Fraser (2012: 362), and Leong (2015: 68). Another term used in some contexts to evaluate statements is xin 信 (“trustworthy,” “sincere,” “reliable”). However, as the Mohists explain, in many such contexts, xin refers not to the semantic status of an utterance but to whether it conforms to the speaker’s actual thoughts (Graham 2003: 275). In other contexts, xin may refer to whether an utterance is reliable or trustworthy.
- 13.
Hansen notes this role of dang but suggests dang is nevertheless a term of pragmatic, not semantic, evaluation, which he interprets as “is appropriately predicable of” rather than “is semantically satisfied by” or “is true of” (Hansen 1985: 509, n. 22). Like Robins, I see no difference between Hansen’s suggested interpretation and taking dang to refer to a semantic status (Robins 2010, 46: n. 72). Either way, as Robins points out, a predicate F is dang with respect to a thing a if only if a is F, a relation sufficient for dang to refer to a semantic status.
- 14.
The Xunzi refers to a gentleman’s speech, conduct, and cognition as being “largely dang” (Xunzi 8/57–58) and describes the sage as “dang right and wrong” (Xunzi 8/103)—the point presumably being that the sage acts and speaks in conformity to the norms of right and wrong. Citations to Xunzi give chapter and line numbers in the Harvard-Yenching concordance (Xunzi 1966).
- 15.
Xunzi 23/10. From the context, the only reasonable interpretation of the pronoun “shi” (this) is that its antecedent is Mencius’s assertion, as the next line of the text clearly uses “shi” again to refer to the assertion, complaining that “this [Mencius’s assertion] does not attain to knowledge of people’s nature.”
- 16.
For example, Xunzi cites a feature in children’s development and says “教使之然 education makes them ran [‘like this’]” (Xunzi 1/4–5). Similarly, Mengzi cites a feature and remarks that “物皆然 things are all ran [‘like this’] (Mengzi 1995, 1.7/5/12).
- 17.
The examples of semantic appraisal using ran considered above are from the “Lesser Selection” (Mozi book 45), not the canons (books 40–43).
- 18.
See Xunzi books 15, 18, and 23. Even in these contexts, not all instances of ran are unambiguously predicated of utterances rather than of things.
- 19.
Examples include the Mohist canons, the Xunzi “Correct Names” essay, and the essays cited earlier on language use in The Annals of Lü Buwei.
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Fraser, C. (2020). Truth in Pre-Han Thought. In: Fung, Ym. (eds) Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy of Logic. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29033-7_6
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