Abstract
This essay argues that the third-century BC Ruist “masters” text Xúnzǐ presents a sophisticated approach to semantics and epistemology in which a concern with truth is at best secondary, not central. Xúnzǐ’s primary concern is with identifying and applying the apt dào (way), which for him is a more fundamental concept that underwrites and explains truth claims. Dào refers to a way or path of personal and social conduct, covering prudential, esthetic, ethical, and political concerns. Xúnzǐ is primarily concerned with whether utterances, along with actions, policies, and social practices, are correct in conforming to dào—specifically, the dào of “good order” (zhì)—rather than whether they are correct in being true. Insofar as he is concerned with truth, he regards the status of assertions as true or not as derivative from their status as following dào or not. A consequence is that for Xúnzǐ questions of value and culture are more basic than questions of truth.
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Notes
The pre-imperial Chinese “masters” texts are the various compilations of writings attributed to “master” figures, such as the Confucian Analects, the Mencius, the Mòzǐ, and the Zhuāngzǐ. Each of these is a composite collection of brief writings composed, compiled, and edited by unknown hands over many years or even generations. The Xúnzǐ (“Master Xún”) is a compilation of short, mostly third-century BC writings named after the influential scholar, teacher, and official Xún Kuàng, who flourished during the middle decades of that century. It is unclear to what extent the material was composed by Xún himself or by his students, associates, or later followers. But the writings present a largely coherent set of views, provided we allow some leeway for development and refinement over Xún’s long career. For convenience, I will discuss the Xúnzǐ as if it presents the views of a single author, Xúnzǐ, although historically it is likely the various short texts discussed were actually written down by a number of hands
Since the original Chinese does not mark plurals, in some contexts, I will use the romanized word “dào” as a singular noun, in others as a plural
This formulation is an attempt to remain neutral between competing theories of truth
Hansen modifies and develops his stance in (C. Hansen, 1992)
Indeed, on this approach, even speakers of the same language often may not share the same concepts, as they may associate them with different beliefs. For example, since a theist and an atheist hold different theories about the deity, on this approach, they would not share the same concept of God. On some construals, such strong holism risks rendering disagreement unintelligible, since it can be taken to imply that instead of disagreeing about the existence of God, the theist and atheist are merely endorsing the use of different concepts
I borrow the Wittgensteinian concept of family resemblance here from Lin Ma and Jaap Van Brakel, who contend that instead of a purported universal concept of truth, in pre-Han thought, we are likely to find a range of concepts that share various resemblances with truth (2019, 1–4, 21–22)
Representational uses of language are addressed but are explained by appeal to the correct use of words according to social norms. For a detailed discussion, see C. Fraser (2021)
For a recent study that develops these themes, see chapters 5 and 6 of C. Fraser (2023)
These are the most commonly used terms for truth-like assessments. In certain contexts, other terms, such as zhèng or kě, may also have expressive roles that overlap “true”
References to the Xúnzǐ give chapter and line numbers in Hung (1966)
Regarding this claim, a critic might ask why we should take the Xúnzǐ to be at all concerned with truth rather than only a loose notion of “accepability.” (I thank an anonymous referee for raising this point.) My suggestion is that the reasons the text itself gives for rejecting the Mencian claim here seem best explained by interpreting it as concerned with truth or a closely related normative status, rather than only with a broader notion of acceptability. The text itself focuses on semantic grounds for rejecting the claim that the nature of people who study is good. My contention is that in this and similar contexts, the expressive role of a notion of “being ‘so’ (rán) by standards of semantic acceptability” coincides with that of truth enough that we can defensibly interpret the text as addressing the truth of the Mencian claim. Analogously, in a particular context, we can interpret an English speaker who does not know the word biǎomèi as talking about her biǎomèi if, according to the best interpretation of what she is saying, she is talking about, for example, a daughter of her mother’s brother who is younger than she. Of course, in both the case of truth and that of biǎomèi, these interpretive claims do not commit us to attributing to the text or speaker a concern with an explicit concept of truth or biǎomèi or a theoretical interest in explaining the nature of truth or biǎomèi
This point emerges circuitously from Hutton’s (E. Hutton, 2021) somewhat Quixotic attempt to find an awareness of intensionality in Xúnzǐ. If we understand the purpose of Xúnzǐ’s discussion of names, it should be unsurprising that the text does not directly address the role of intensions in speech
For an overview of this discourse, see C. Fraser (2023), chapter 6. The topic of “correcting names” is addressed in a range of texts, including the Confucian Analects, the Guǎnzǐ, the Book of Lord Shāng, Lǚ’s Annals, and the Xúnzǐ
Sòng Xíng held that fighting could be prevented if people learned to regard insults as irrelevant to their social or moral status and that people could live a fulfilling life of equanimity if they recognized that their genuine or characteristic desires were few and easily satisified. The later Mohist claim expresses their stance that capital punishment is distinct from murder. Huì Shī’s statement was likely intended to illustrate the relative or perspectival nature of similarities and differences. “Horses are not horses” appears to be an abbreviated version of Gōngsūn Lóng’s thesis that “white horses are not horses,” which turns on a deliberate equivocation between predication of a general term (the general term “horse” is predicable of all white horses) and the relation of identity (the extension of “white horse” is not identical to that of “horse”). For further discussion, see C. Fraser (2016)
In a well-formed biàn, the competing assertions are logically contradictory, so that by the law of excluded middle, one of them must “fit” (dàng) the object. The Mohists’ example is that arguing over whether something is an ox or not is a well-formed biàn: one of the two claims must stand. Arguing over whether something is an ox or a horse is not a proper biàn, as both terms could fail to fit the object, which could be something other than an ox or a horse
For a detailed treatment of these themes in Xúnzǐ, see C. Fraser (2011)
Error due to bias was a widely discussed topic in early Chinese epistemology. See C. Fraser (2023), chapter 5
For a more detailed discussion of Xúnzǐ’s conception of epistemic agency and how it may tie together reliabilist and responsibilist themes in recent virtue epistemology, see C. Fraser (2022)
I am grateful to two anonymous referees for thoughtful and constructive comments that prompted numerous revisions
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Fraser, C. Truth and the way in Xúnzǐ. AJPH 2, 12 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-023-00066-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-023-00066-2