Work in
progress: Not for citation or reproduction. Please send comments, criticisms
and suggestions to Chad Hansen at chansen(at-sign)hku.hk
Table of Contents
Textual Rediscovery
Ethics
Epistemology
Theory of Language
1.
Realism
Base analysis
2.
Semantic Paradoxes
3.
Compound Terms
4.
Problems
5.
Kung-sun
Lung and the White-Horse Paradox
6.
Phrase Matching
References and Further Reading
Ethics
Graham speculated that the scattered
fragments of one of the remaining sections (traditionally known as The
Greater Pick) may have included a more formal treatment of Mozi's ethical
utilitarianism. They gave it in axiom form: Morality is utility and utility is
what satisfies you when you get it (as opposed to what you desire). Later
Mohists gave a weighting account of the original standard of benefit versus
harm--one prefers the lesser harm or greater benefit. They differentiated
between "thick" and "thin" concern. This may have be a way
to address the supposed conflict between utilitarian universalism and our
special care to those closest to us. Just as self-care is an efficient means to
general well being, so is the care of our relatives and neighbors. Since I know
my own father's preferences and we enjoy each others' company, my caring for
him and you for your father achieves the good more efficiently than vice versa.
So appropriate caring for yourself and your "thick" relations is
consistent with a thin moral concern for everyone's well-being.
The Later Mohists probably were first to
abandon the authority of tian "nature" and both reference to
and reliance on xin "heart-mind." They viewed these as terms
used in theories to avoid accountability. Unlike Mozi, they treated ren "humanity"
as a kind of Confucian partial love. Their realism presupposes that carving the
world "at the joints" promoted utility. One obvious ground was that
objectivity in standards of language use, operational or measurement-like
interpretation, facilitate wide-spread linguistic agreement and promote
coordinated judgment and action.
They worked out an alternative to
rectifying names that was consistent with objective or neutral standards for
word reference. They proposed to rectify guiding phrases instead of
"names." While thieves are humans, the act of
killing-thieves (execution) is not the act of killing humans (murder).
Making this ethical point led the Mohists to skeptical conclusions about
linguistic "stability."
Epistemology
The Mohists did not separate epistemology
from their more general theory of language. They were "analyzing"
terms like zhi "to know." The analysis did not contrast zhi
with believing. They distinguished (1) know how or skill, from (2)
knowledge by acquaintance and (3) a rare (perhaps idiosyncratic) use of zhi
"know" that strikes us now as a substitute for consciousness (for
which there was no rival term). This use also replaces (for the Mohist) xin
"heart-mind" as the "locus of knowing." One important form
of skill knowledge is the ability to "discourse" on a topic. This
arguably sweeps propositional knowledge into the "skill" category.
The main topics of zhi (know) describe
a process: we learn names (words) and objects, then how to "combine"
them, and finally how to wei "act." The Mohist Canon stands
out among classical texts for its emphasis on checking linguistic knowledge
against reality. They left the form of that verification vague, however. The
thrust appears again to draw a contrast to rectifying names. The standard of
correct use of terms should not be mere convention or authority, but actual
similarities and differences among things. This arguably gives a theory of
language anchor to Mozi's anti-conventional attack on Confucian ethics.
Mozi used an example that can help us fix
on the Later Mohists' concept of "knowing." A blind person, he
argued, can know to produce utterances like 'black as coal' or 'white as snow'
but he cannot distinguish things when placed in front of him. He knows names,
but not "stuff" or how to "combine" them. Thus he cannot
use language to guide his action.
The Mohists, as we noted above, used no
propositional 'belief' analysis and paid scant attention to other sentential
contexts. "Knowing how to combine" meant competently assigning terms
to things in real contexts. 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.
Theory of Language
Realism Base analysis
The most comprehensive discussion in the
collection of Later Mohist writings deals with questions about language. The
texts give us a plausible general Chinese theory of how words work. A term
"picks out" part of reality. When we use one 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 a skill at judging shi 'is
this' and fei 'is not.' The 'is not' generates an opposite for each name and
marks the point of distinction or discrimination from the other stuff of the
world.
Once we conventionally attach a term to
some reality, the inherent similarities and differences determine its
subsequent application. Conventions presuppose a world-guided way to mark
distinctions. Mohists view name-object relations on a mereological model, that
is, talking about distinctions and boundaries. A name applies to a (scattered)
reality having some kind of tong "similarity."
The Mohist's pragmatic substitutes for
'reference', ju "pick out" and qu "choose," had a
non-abstract, practical tone. A name picks out a stuff from its 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" theme implicit in the doctrine of rectifying
names. Some terms are more general than others and several might pick out the
same object. Names, the Mohists argued, could be very general (like 'thing'
itself), or based on similarity classes (such as 'horse') or applied to only
one thing (such as 'John'). They saw no objection in principle to these
overlapping scopes and two names for the same thing.
Their analysis portrays disagreements as
arising from different ways of making the distinctions that gives rise to
contraries. Translators thus render the word pien as either
"distinction" or "dispute." In Mohist use, it came to stand
particularly for philosophical dispute--including disputes in ethics. The
Mohists argued that, in a "distinction dispute," one party will
always be right. For any term, the thing in question will either be shi 'is
this' or fei 'is not'.
The central term of assessment in the
Mohist study was k'o "assertable," not any counterpart of
"truth." They used k'o in several related ways. We can say an
expression is "assertable" of some object. One phrase may be
assertable of whatever another phrase "picks out." "Assertable"
thus became a way of exploring semantic relations between terms. Mohists asked
whether we can sometimes, always or never describe things picked out by term X
as Y.
The analysis, although it uses
assertability rather than truth, yielded a familiar and important conclusion
against certain forms of relativism. The Mohists argued that in any dispute
involving "distinctions", there will be a 'winner.' If one disputant
claimed it was ox and the other that it was not ox, only one could be correct.
When one disputant claimed the object was ox and the other that it was horse,
it would not count that as a "distinction dispute". This was merely a
formal result, but the Mohists took it as confirming that the world, not
conventions, determined the right designation. The winner is the one whose
description "hit on" it.
Semantic Paradoxes
The Mohists, as noted above, had the most
realistic theory about the relation of language and the world. Real-world
similarities and differences should guide our use of words. They
"Quined" the apparently common "mystical" claim that
language distorts the Dao. (See LAOZI, MENCIUS and ZHUANGZI.) To say anything
along these lines is to treat all language as "not acceptable" or
"perverse." Regarding all language as 'perverse,' they noted, was
itself 'perverse.' They similarly rebutted claims that we should abandon
distinctions. To reject distinctions is to fei fei "not-this
'not-this'". To fei fei is also perverse (Quining again that the person
who rejects it, does it.) Finally, they similarly dispatched "learning not
to learn."
These results are distant cousins of 'All
sentences are false.' Unlike the classic liar paradox, the universal form
sentence does have a consistent truth value. It is always false. The Mohist
conceptual tools, however, lacked both seemingly crucial concepts for the
classic paradox--'sentence' and 'truth'. They had a separate, self-condemning
analysis of each mistake and explain them all as resulting from self-reference
("one's own language"). They suggest the proposer of such absurdities
try harder to find acceptable words. These results undermine the popular
anti-language intuitionist positions in Chinese thought--notably Mencius and
Laozi. It invalidates any claim that language distorts the Dao
("guidance").
Compound Terms
The Mohists, however, uncovered grounds of
skepticism in their own system. They argued that the way terms combined was not
world-guided, at least not as a straightforward extension of the way the terms
themselves worked. Here is a striking case for postulating a contrasting
Chinese conceptual structure. The analysis of compound terms makes most sense
if we suppose the theorizing was going on against a background assumption of a
part-whole or mereological metaphysical picture. This also explains both the
assimilation of common nouns and adjectives in the analysis and the tendency to
describe all terms as ming "names." (See LANGUAGE)
The paradigm or straightforward compounds,
in the Mohist view, pick out the sum of whatever the individual terms pick out.
Classical Chinese lacked pluralization and some compound term such as
'ox-horse' worked like "cats 'n dogs". Classical Chinese was rich in
similar compounds, e.g., sky-earth = world, boy-girl =child, mountain-water =
scenery. Modification compounds (such as 'white horse') worked as similar
structures do in English. The Mohist took the former model 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". Their analysis of such compounds made them
analogous to generalization.
The Mohists ask what was assertable of the
things picked out by compound terms. In the case of 'ox-horse', the Mohists
observe that 'not-ox' is assertable of 'ox-horse' on the same grounds that 'ox'
is. The explanation goes that part of ox-horse is non-ox, so 'non-ox' is
"assertable". We can understand the idea by reflecting on another
example. We may ask someone how many children he has by asking about his
"boys n' girls." Suppose the answer is 'three'. Now we may ask how
many are boys. The answer may come back, 'none'. This is a case in which we could
say 'his boy-girls are not boys.'
However, the Mohist seems to have
something stronger in mind. Even if he said 'two girls and a boy,' the Mohist
would argue that it would be right to say (some of) his boy-girls were non-boy.
Thus the Mohist concludes that, although we cannot say ox is non-ox or horse is
non-horse, we can say intelligibly that ox-horse is non-ox-non-horse.
The paradigm contrast is
"hard-white." This is also a compound term but it's component stuffs
"blend." So the components are inseparable when combined. Wherever
you go in the hard-white, they say, you get both. This reflects the more
familiar (to the West) semantics of modification: an intersection compound. The
scope of combined term is where the scopes of the two components intersect.
Ox-Horse, by contrast, is a sum compound. The scope of the combined term is the
union of the scopes of the two component terms. The Mohists used 'ox-horse' as
a general description of the sum paradigm and 'hard-white' for the
"product" or "intersection" model.
The Mohists contrasted ox-horse combining
as one in which there was no "interpenetration": the two components
remained separate in the compound. In hard-white "penetration", the
two things "exhausted" each other. They called the ox-horse separable
compounds in contrast to the hard-white inseparable ones. They never used the
term ti "substantive part" of the components of the latter.
The Mohists do not give us any rule for
distinguishing intersection from union compounds beyond the metaphysical interpretation
as 'penetrating' or 'excluding.' They do not explicitly use the language of
scope. These results arise partly from their treating both nouns and adjectives
as 'names'--terms with a "spread". They share the pragmatic function
of "picking out" or "distinguishing" one part of reality
from the rest. Absent a focus on the grammatical distinction of noun and
adjective, the Mohists are left with a choice. Either the way names form
compounds is simply arbitrary or it is explained mainly metaphysically, i.e.,
by whether or not its "stuffs" or "realities" can
"penetrate."
A question lurked behind this treatment.
In what sense is a compound really two things? The system acknowledged the
flexibility of language. We could view almost anything either as a compound of
more basic stuffs or as a part of some greater compound.
Problems
The Mohists' realism failed to give any
adequate account of what similarities and differences should count in making a
distinction. They neither offered a causal criteria nor had a conception of
axiomatic science to ground selection among similarities. Though Graham argued
that their propositions resembled a deductive scheme of Euclidean definitions,
the most common "definitions" were partial synonyms--apparently
thought of as terms that could be substituted for the head term in some
contexts. This (along with an etymology) seems to be the implicit theory of
early Chinese dictionaries, too. The Mohist text exhibits a theory of language
with no hint of a concept of meaning.
They noticed many senses in which things
can be the "same" or "different." Some reality might differ
only in that we use alternative names. Being 'two' was necessarily
differentiated even though called by one name. Realities could also be
"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 differ or be alike in location.
Finally they could be similar in belonging to the same "kind".
The Mohist analyzed "kind",
however, in a loose way. Having that with which to "same" was the
criteria of being "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?' The Mohists suggest this is an unintelligible question
because it compares two different "kinds".
The Mohists rejected "wild pickings
out" but did not give any way of identifying them. The examples were of
using similarities of distinctions that were unconventional. The looseness of
this account of classifying together with the indeterminacy of the result of
compounding, buttressed the skeptic's position (see Hui Shi and Zhuangzi below)
that the world offered no reliable basis for linguistic distinctions.
Kung-sun Lung and the White-Horse Paradox
Against the Mohist background, we can now
make some sense of the previously obscure writings of Gongsun Long. The text
that bears his name consists of several apparent dialogues between a
"sophist" and an "objector." The sophist typically starts
each dialogue with a counter-intuitive paradox. The objector dissents and the
sophist defends his thesis. Graham argued that later writers forged at least
two of these dialogues using misunderstood fragments of Mohist semantics. They
apparently copied the phrases after copyists had shuffled the Canon and mixed
the indexing characters into the text.
We will discuss two of the remaining
dialogues--'White Horse' and 'Referring and Things'. They pose difficult
puzzles for which different scholars have offered speculative, controversial
and mutually inconsistent interpretations. The varied readings flow partly from
different standards for choosing 'translation manuals.' I discuss two
interpretations here both to illustrate that point and to allow us to locate a
range of alternative views of Gongsun Long's Dao.
In the (possibly apocryphal) preface to
the dialogues, Gongsun Long gives a Confucian motivation for his theorizing.
Confucius rectified names. Gongsun Long alleges that he is defending the
master's linguistic Dao. Most Confucians would reject the affiliation, but it
does make sense on formal grounds. If rectifying was intended to remove
ambiguity from a guiding Dao, then it requires that exactly one name from the
guiding discourse should refer to the object in the action situation. I either
regard the male before me as 'father' or as 'ruler' or as 'person'. He may be
in one sense all three, but if I am to extract guidance from a code, I must
decide which rule to use here and now. That requires deciding which term is
relevant to this situation. The Mohists rejected the one-name-one-thing
principle and argued that we should rectify phrases instead--e.g. thieves are
men, but killing thieves is not killing men. (See below.)
The Mohist account of compounding also had
negative implications for the Confucian maxim. Separable or sum compounds, such
as 'ox-horse', technically conform to "one-name-one-thing." The
combination of names picks out a sum of the two. Hard-white compounding, by
contrast, violates the principle of strict clarity and consistency in naming.
We change each term's scope of reference when we compound them. The terms thus
pick out different "things" when compounded.
Other sources confirm that Gongsun Long
defended two further theses: 'separating the inseparable' and 'separating
hard-white.' However, Graham's identification of the spurious source of the
dialogue on 'Hard-White' remains convincing. That he had defended the thesis
gave the forger an invitation. We cannot, accordingly, rely on the dialogue to
explain the slogan. Still, we can plausibly deal with both slogans together
since 'hard-white' is the Mohist example of an 'inseparable' or
'interpenetrating' compound. To 'separate' would be to regard them as
'excluding each other' and to treat the compound as a sum. Gongsun Long would,
consistently, object to the Mohist's hard-white model.
Gongsun Long's example, "white horse,"
takes one term from each type of compound. The White Horse dialogue begins with
a question in the canonical analytic form: 'Is "white horse not
horse" assertable?' followed by the answer, 'assertable.' The sophist's
first defense of the paradox is that 'white' names a color and 'horse' names a
shape. Shape and color are different so a combination of shape and color is not
merely a shape.
The other most familiar argument the
sophist gives is 'if you ask for a horse, both a black or yellow horse can
"arrive." If you ask for a white horse, a black horse or yellow horse
will not arrive.' This illustrates one of the sophist's fall-back threads of
argument. 'X is not Y' follows from 'X is different from or distinguishable
from Y.' The linking theme of the two arguments is that white horse is a
combination of two things and this requires that 'white horse not horse' be
assertable. The objector gives the plausible Mohist response that 'asking for a
white horse' is indeed different from 'asking for a horse,' but a white horse
is still a horse.
So one line of interpretation links the
paradox to Mohist semantics and takes ma to "name" its scope. If its
scope changes, it is a different name. The other line of interpretation takes
the paradox to flow from a novel and technically inexpressible Platonic
insight. It takes the term ma (horse) to refer to an abstract or semantic
object—horseness. Bai ma (white horse) similarly refers to white-horseness. The
opening sentence thus states the true proposition that the two abstractions are
distinct entities. Since the connected terms are logically singular, the fei
(is not) represents 'non-identity'.
This first line of interpretation is
motivated by the principle of humanity and undermined by charity. It makes the
paradoxical thesis accessible from the philosophical context, but wrong. The
second makes the paradox true but leaves unexplained how the sophist would have
had access to the concepts involved. It also lacks consistency. The abstract reading
can not apply to when ma is used in the supporting arguments--all of which make
more sense as referring to concrete horses.
The first interpretation, where ma refers
holistically to horse-stuff, can still motivate the 'distinct-hence-different'
line of argument and yet consistently interpret the concrete references in the
rest of the dialogue. If we similarly regard white as the
mass-substantive--white stuff--rather than the abstract 'whiteness'--we can see
a connection to the Mohist theory of compound names. Gong-sun Long regards
'intersection' or 'interpenetrating' compounds as contrary to the
one-name-one-thing principle. If white horse consists of two names, each should
consistently name (scattered) things. Used in combination, their 'naming' ought
to remain consistent. Thus, they should name the sum of the two stuffs and, as
in the case of 'ox-horse', 'not-horse' would be assertable of it.
Alternately, we may either deny that
'white horse' consists of two names or that they are the same names as when
used separately. 'White horse' must be thought of as having no essential
relation to 'horse'. It must be a sui generis term for a new stuff. We could
then say 'white horse is horse' is not necessarily true. Its truth is an
accident of usage which might have been otherwise. Thus 'white horse not horse'
is assertable.
Gongsun Long's argument then becomes a
dilemma. Either we regard 'white-horse' as a sum-compound term--in which case
the 'ox-horse' result follows--or we regard it as a sui generis non-compound
name--in which case the conventions of its use could tie it to anything at all.
It need not necessarily be horse. The assumption must be that a name is the
same only if it has identical scope (names the same mereological thing). Since
'horse' in 'white horse' does not have that scope it is a different name. Its
use in a compound constitutes an distinct name from its single use.
Gongsun Long's other dialogue poses, if
possible, even more daunting barriers to interpretation. The first sentence
seems to be an explicit contradiction--everything under heaven is zhi
(pointing) and yet pointing is not pointing. The rest of the dialogue is
content-thin and teeters repeatedly on the brink of explicit syntactic
contradiction. The only content words are the puzzling 'pointing' along with
'thing-kind' and 'the world'.
Most interpreters take the issue to be the
meaning of zhi (pointing). Most treat it as semantic reference or meaning. It
is literally a finger and is the most plausible candidate for a counterpart of
"referring." The Later Mohists, recall, used the term ju
(picking-out) and qu (choosing) instead. There are reasons for worry about the
second interpretation, since we saw no evidence of any intensional account of
'meaning'. Using 'meaning,' however, makes this dialogue support the abstract
interpretation of the 'White Horse' paradox. As in Western conceptualism, the
abstract object may serve as the semantic "content." Otherwise, we
would have no sign of a sense-reference distinction or any indication that it
is individual objects rather than mereological wholes or types that we 'point
to'.
Graham's speculative interpretation
employs the 'reference' reading. Although far from proved, it is
philosophically interesting and relevant to issues that emerge in theory of
language and metaphysics. Graham treats the crucial first phrase as meaning
that although one can refer to things, you ca not refer to everything. In
talking about everything, you fail talk about your own act of referring.
Zhuangzi later makes a similar argument against assertions of absolute
monism--to say everything is one is to have the one and the saying, which makes
two! Tempting as it is, it has little theoretical connection to the White-Horse
thesis. Graham treats them as dealing with the principle that whole is
different from the part. The maxim needs both careful formulation and plausible
motivation. There are no other very persuasive interpretive theories.
Phrase Matching
Although the Mohists proposed a realist
account of "picking-out," they embedded it in the theory that
language guides action. Thus the final object of knowing is knowing how to
"deem act". They treat guiding action as the real point of combining
names. Thus words pick out stuff, while strings or "phrases" convey
intentions. In Name and Object (Smaller Pick) this led them to analyze
compounds that pick out actions. In the most intact long section of their text,
the Mohists pursued a new analysis--one that took a superficially logical form.
Premise: X is Y (white horse is
horse)
Conclusion: KX is KY (ride
white horse is ride horse)
They called this linguistic algebra
"matching phrases" and argued that it was not "reliable."
We take for granted that we know the appropriate or assertable form of each
phrase. A successful outcome would be this: whenever the assertable form with
simple terms was positive (an "is this" phrase) then the parallel
with compound terms should also be positive (a "so" phrase). Conversely,
a negative base (X is not Y--a "not this" phrase) should yield a
negative result (KX is not KY--a "not so" phrase).
The Mohists argue for the instability of
this ideal of phrase-matching by listing several different kinds of breakdown:
Sometimes an "is this" yields a "not-so".
Sometimes a "not this" yields a "so".
Sometimes a reference is comprehensive and sometimes not.
Sometimes one reference is "is this" and another one is
"not this".
The body of the essay consists of examples
that illustrate the respective outcomes.
Graham, drawing on his part-of-speech
analysis of "is this" (subject) and "so" (verb), treated
the chapter as evidence that the Mohists discovered the subject-predicate
sentence. He translated the procedure as 'matching sentences' and treated it as
a discussion of logical form. The first two models do rely on syntactic
complexes (X is Y) which resemble syllogistic premises, but the latter two do
not.
(A technical note on grammar: Classical
Chinese uses no articles and has no "is" connective. Expressions
ending with the particle ye (assertion marker) mark descriptive uses of
noun-phrases (predicate nominative). It signals that one is applying a
descriptive term to a contextually selected object--not using the word to
identify the topic. Translators typically render such structures in English as
'(X) is Y.' In Chinese topic-comment structure, the topic term (X) is optional.
The comment may stand alone if the context supplies a topic. The assertion marker,
in other words, should not be thought of as linking two terms, but as tying a
predicate to some reality.)
The "this-so" analysis given by
the Mohist does fit the examples in a way consistent with the topic-comment
analysis. If, on the other hand, we focus on the examples as sentences and
treat the pattern as a form of inference, then the Mohist analysis will
resemble a kind of algebraic logic. I so regarded it in my own earlier study.
However, consistent with a topic-comment structure, I now regard it as
extending the analysis of the conventional semantic effects of combining
"names" to form "phrases".
That the analysis focuses on conventional
semantics of terms rather than the logic of sentences sheds a new light on how
the examples work. The Mohist does not use the model to correct conventional
reasoning errors. He depends on "proper" use. What we would
conventionally say determines whether a result is a "so" or a
"not-so." The most thoroughly illustrated breakdown are those where
an "is this" base produces a "not-so". The examples are:
Parents are people; serving one's parents is not serving the people;
[Suppose] a younger brother is a handsome man; loving one's younger
brother would not be loving a handsome man.
A carriage is wood; riding a carriage is not riding wood.
A boat is wood; entering a boat is not entering wood.
Robbers are people; abounding in robbers is not abounding in people;
lacking robbers is not lacking people.
The Mohist expands on the last example in
a way that signals both the ethical importance of the analysis and the nature
of the alleged breakdown in parallelism.
Disliking the abundance of robbers is not disliking the abundance of
people.
Desiring to be without robbers is not desiring to be without people.
Everyone would agree with these so they
should not object if we say 'robbers are people but killing robbers is not
killing people.'
We suppose, following Graham, that the
Mohists are defending their inherited doctrine of universal love by arguing
that it is consistent with the (presumed) practice in Mohist communities of
executing thieves.
What the denial amounts to is this: even
if naming were objectively constant and reliable, the use of names in
descriptions of actions or intentions could not reliably take us from an
"is this" to a "so". An execution is not murder. Loving a
brother is morally required, loving a handsome man is (presumably) shameful.
Serving one's parents is one kind of duty and serving the people another. One
does not fulfill the latter merely in doing the former.
What emerges is an alternative strategy
for dealing with the problem that Confucius addressed via rectifying names. The
Mohists resist the implication that in executing thieves we must deny that
thieves are people. They deny instead that executing thieves is murdering.
Rectifying takes place at the "phrase" or "so" level rather
than at the "name" level.
The next set of examples illustrate the
converse case--those where we start with a "not this" base and get a
"so" result.
To read books is not books; to like reading books is to like books.
Cockfights are not cocks; to like cockfights is to like cocks.
About to fall into a well is not falling into a well. To stop one about
to fall into a well is to stop one falling into a well.
The Mohist here expands on fatalism. 'That
there is fate is not fated; to deny that there is fate is to deny fate.' It is
harder to reconstruct an ethical problem that is plausibly solved by this
analysis.
The algebraic form is abandoned in
illustrating the next two breakdowns in parallelism. The first is 'part
comprehensive; part not.'
'Loving people' depends on comprehensively loving people. 'Not loving
people' does not.
'Rides horses' does not depend on comprehensively riding horses. To have
ridden on horses is enough to count as riding horses.
The examples highlight the holistic
pattern in reasoning about reference. In one phrase the term-reference is
implicitly comprehensive, in the other it is not.
Finally, we come to the examples of 'one "is
this" and one is "not this"'.
Fruit of a peach is a peach, fruit of a bramble is not a bramble.
Asking about a person's illness is asking about the person. Disliking
the person's illness is not disliking the person.
A person's ghost is not the person. Your brother's ghost is your
brother. Offering to a ghost is not offering to a person. Offering to your
brother's ghost is offering to your brother.
If the indicated horse's eyes are blind, then we call the horse blind.
The horses eyes are large yet we do not call the horse large.
If the indicated oxen's hairs are brown, then we call the oxen brown.
The indicated oxen's hairs are many yet we do not call the oxen many.
One horse is horse; two horses are horse. Saying 'horses are four footed
things' is a case of one horse and four feet, not a pair of horses and four
feet. Saying 'horses are partly white' is two horses and some white, not one
horse and partly white.
There is no further analysis or summing
up. The moral, we assume, is a negative one. Had we treated the first algebraic
model as a kind of logic, the Mohists' argument by example still would show
that it was invalid. It is not a reliable form in the sense that a true premise
formally guarantees a true conclusion. However, I now argue that it is not
about sentences and truth at all. It concerns whether we can draw reliable
parallels from terms to longer (guiding) phrases.
The implicit answer is 'no'. The Mohists
offer no constant or consistent principles guiding the construction of longer
"phrase" out of terms even when the words are consistently applied to
external realities. They offer no way systematically to rationalize the
conventional patterns of use. They retreat implicitly from Mozi's goal of
replacing convention with a 'constant "guide".' If there is such a
"guide", then it is not a product of any simple projection from
linguistic reference. Moral guidance cannot derive from knowledge of natural
kinds. It requires conventional, creative human social activity. Dialectically,
the negative result gives ammunition to the Daoists who argue that no constant
"guide" exists.
References and Further Reading
"Graham, Angus (1978) Later Mohist
Logic Ethics and Science, London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
(The only source in English for the Later Mohist text. Difficult--understanding
Graham virtually requires knowledge of classical Chinese.)
------ (1989) Disputers of the Tao:
Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, La Salle: Open Court. (An
easier but less detailed treatment in the context of Graham’s account of
ancient Chinese thought.)
Hansen, Chad (1983) Language and
Logic in Ancient China, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
(Difficult--Based on Graham’s reconstruction. A philosophical argument for a
radically different interpretation of the linguistic doctrines.)
------ (1992) A Daoist Theory of
Chinese Thought, New York: Oxford University Press. (An easier and more
extended treatment in an account of ancient Chinese philosophy that emphasizes
language.)
Fung, Yu-lan, 1952, History of
Chinese Philosophy, Derk Bodde tr., Princeton, Princeton University
Press. (A classic account that highlights the abstract interpretation of the
‘White Horse’ dialogue. Good for general purposes.)
