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Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?

Chen Yuting Fellow
· 6 replies · 328 views
TruthAnalyticBuddhistChineseConfucianismMohismMoziWang ChongZhuangzi#chinese-philosophy#concept-of-truth#mohist-canons#shi-fei
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This question sits at the centre of my dissertation on the Later Mohist canons, and I would welcome other views.

In 1985 Chad Hansen published an influential paper arguing, roughly, that classical Chinese philosophy did not use a semantic concept of truth, a property of sentences or propositions. The early thinkers were concerned instead with guiding behaviour: with dao (ways), with shi and fei (this, not-this, approving and disapproving), and with ke (what is admissible or acceptable to say). On this reading, when a classical Chinese thinker disputes a claim, the question is whether to assent to a way of using names, not whether a proposition corresponds to a fact.

Many scholars have pushed back. My own material is part of the pushback. The Later Mohists define disputation (bian) as contending over a pair of contradictories, and say that the one who wins is the one whose claim fits, dang. Fitting something sounds a lot like being true. Later, Wang Chong's Lunheng tests popular beliefs against evidence and labels claims as empty (xu) or solid (shi). That looks like truth-talk too.

On the other hand, Hansen's defenders say these are pragmatic notions of appropriateness misread through European eyes.

So I put the question to the forum. Is truth a universal concept that every serious tradition has, under whatever word? Or is it one way, among others, of organising thought about language and the world? And how would we decide?

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6 answers

  1. Liu Jianguo

    Contributor

    I read only the Zhuangzi, so I can speak to one corner. In the chapter on seeing things as equal, Zhuangzi talks all the time about shi and fei, and his point is that each school calls "this" what the other calls "not-this", depending on where it stands. That supports Hansen: it is all about affirming and denying from positions.

    But Zhuangzi also says things are so (ran) of themselves. Something is the case, even if our shi and fei are partial. So even the most perspectival of the old books seems to assume the world has its own way of being.

  2. Lin Pei-shan

    Contributor

    From the Neo-Confucian side there is a different concept that I think English "truth" partly covers: cheng, usually translated sincerity, but which in the Zhongyong is something like being real all the way through, the integrity of a thing being what it is. It is truth as authenticity rather than as correspondence. If we only look for a property of sentences, we may miss that the tradition was very interested in truth, just located somewhere else, in persons and things.

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  3. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    A methodological worry. That a language lacks a single word matching "true" doesn't show its speakers lack the concept. And Hansen's argument was more subtle than lexical; it was about whether sentences were treated as the unit of meaning. But it's hard to have disputation, where one side wins because it fits, without something that does truth's job. Yuting's dang seems decisive to me, though I'd defer to her on the reading.

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  4. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    Fellow

    Don't forget the Buddhist translators. When Indian texts came into Chinese, satya, as in the four noble truths, was rendered with the character 諦 (di). Chinese Buddhist philosophers then developed elaborate theories of the two truths, conventional and ultimate. Whatever we say about the classical period, from the early centuries CE Chinese thinkers were certainly arguing about truth explicitly, with an Indian concept and a Chinese vocabulary.

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  5. Phạm Quốc Bảo

    Contributor

    A translator's footnote from Hanoi. In Vietnamese we say "chân lý" for philosophical truth, a Sino-Vietnamese word from the same characters as Chinese zhenli. As far as I know, its use as the standard equivalent of European "truth" is modern, though the characters are much older and appear in Buddhist texts. When I translate French philosophy, "vérité" sometimes needs "chân lý" and sometimes "sự thật", which is closer to "the fact of the matter". Two words for one French word. Perhaps the question "did they have the concept?" is really "which of our several concepts did they have?"

  6. Chen Yuting

    Fellow

    Thank you, this is helpful. Phạm's last line may be the best formulation of my thesis question. Kenneth reminds me I have been too narrowly classical. My current position: the Later Mohists had something functionally like a correspondence notion (dang), Zhuangzi had perspectival affirmation resting on things being so of themselves, and the Neo-Confucians had truth-as-integrity. Hansen was right that sentence-truth was not central. He was wrong, I think, that it was absent.

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