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Argument by Analogy in Ancient China

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Abstract

Argument by analogy has long been regarded as the characteristic way of arguing in ancient Chinese culture. Classic Chinese philosophers not only prefer to use analogy to argue for their own views, but also take efforts to theorize it in a systematic way. This paper aims to provide a careful study on the relevant ideas in ancient China in order to reconstruct the ancient Chinese theory of argument by analogy, and then to reveal some of its distinctive features through a comparison with the Western counterpart account as developed by Aristotle. It is indicated that in ancient China analogical argument was conceived primarily as a way of arguing based on classification, with a unique mechanism of taking and giving according to kind. On that basis, it is argued that although such a characterization captures the logical structure of analogical argument in a similar way to Aristotle, the ancient Chinese theory stresses the foundational role of a particular notion of kind, thus makes the construction and application of analogical arguments become highly flexible and context-sensitive. Moreover, it is also contended that in ancient China the rationale of analogical arguments is explained from a general perspective of kind, relying upon the universal knowledge pertaining to the forming of kinds. Then it is further revealed that, unlike Aristotle who emphasizes the causal links between attributes in the physical world, ancient Chinese thinkers justify analogical argument by appealing to some normative metaphysical and epistemological principles.

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Notes

  1. All quotations of ancient Chinese texts in this paper are translations. Following the reference conventions in the field of ancient Chinese philosophy, I specify both the name of the classic work and the title of the particular chapter where the original Chinese quotation is from. In addition, since classic Chinese works normally have various versions or collections edited and interpreted by different scholars, I also include the information about the particular book from which my quotations are taken.

  2. The name of Mohists refers to Mozi and his followers, they are endorsers of Mohism, an ancient school of Chinese philosophy that springs from the teachings of Mozi in the 5th century BCE.

  3. See Guarini et al. (2009) for a more comprehensive, multi-disciplinary collection of references on analogy.

  4. A possible reconstruction of this argument in line with the general model (as revealed in Sect. 3.2) would be: Human nature and flowing water both belong to the same kind of “things that can be ‘channeled’(or developed) arbitrarily”, and it is clear that flowing water has no tendency (to go east or west), therefore, human nature also has no tendency (of being good or bad).

  5. In a relevantly similar vein, Kraus also argues that it is a combination of an induction and a deduction in which “a general statement is established by way of induction, and then from there a particular case (the target claim) is again deduced” (Kraus 2015, p. 178).

  6. It might occur to many readers that the Chinese notion of Li has a strong similarity with Aristotle’s notion of substantial form, which could also be recognized as organizational principle of matter that makes all things into various kinds of beings in the Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics. Although a more detailed comparison of those two notion would definitely be of importance for the studies of comparative philosophy, here I choose not to explore it in this paper, because it seems to be unnecessary and irrelevant to our discussions since Aristotle did not explain the reasonableness of analogy by means of substantial form.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable criticisms, which are very helpful for me to improve this paper. The work in this paper is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (18ZDA033), and the Guizhou Guoxue Project for Philosophy and Social Sciences (17GZGX23).

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  1. Institute of Logic and Cognition, Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, People’s Republic of China

    Yun Xie

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Xie, Y. Argument by Analogy in Ancient China. Argumentation 33, 323–347 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-018-09475-7

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