Taoism Essay Research Paper Classical Chinese theory — страница 2

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world. We can be sure only that the xin did trigger reactions to discourse-relevant stimuli. Reflecting the theory of xin, the implicit theory of language made no distinction between describing and prescribing. Chinese thinkers assumed the core function of language is guiding behavior. Representational features served that prescriptive goal. In executing guidance, we have to identify relevant "things" in context. If the discourse describes some behavior toward one?s elder, one needs a way correctly to identify the elder and what counts as the prescribed behavior. Correct action according to a conventional dao must also take into account other descriptions of the situation such as ?urgent?, ?normal?, etc. These issues lay behind Confucian theories of "rectifying

names." The psychological theory (like the linguistic) did not take on a sentential form. Classical Chinese language had no "belief-grammar", i.e., forms such as X believes that P (where P is a proposition). The closest grammatical counterpart focuses on the term, not the sentence and point to the different function of xin. Where Westerners would say "He believes (that) it is good" classical Chinese would either use "He goods it" or "He, yi (with regard to) it, wei (deems:regards) good." Similarly zhi (to know) takes noun phrases, not sentences, as object. The closest counterpart to propositional knowledge would be "He knows its being (deemed as) good." The xin guides action in the world in virtue of the categories it assigns

to things, but it does not house mental or linguistic "pictures" of facts. Technically, the attitude was what philosophers a de re attitude. The "subject" was in the world not in the mind. The context of use picked out the intended item. The attitude consisted of projecting the mental category or concept on the actual thing. We distinguish this functional role best by talking about a disposition rather than a belief. It is a disposition to assign some reality to a category. The requisite faculty of the heart-mind (or the senses) is the ability to discriminate or distinguish T from not-T, e.g., good from bad, human being from thief. We might, alternately, think of Chinese ?belief? and ?knowledge? as predicate attitudes rather than propositional attitudes.

Predicate attitudes are the heart-mind?s function. A basic judgment is, thus, neither a picture nor representation of some metaphysically complex fact. Its essence is picking out what counts as ?X? in the situation (where ?X? is a term in the guiding discourse). The context fixes the object and the heart-mind assigns it to a relevant category. Hence, Chinese folk theory places a (learned or innate) ability to make distinctions correctly in following a dao in the central place Western folk psychology places ideas. They implicitly understood correctness as conformity to the social-historical norm. One of the projects of some Chinese philosophers was trying to provide a natural or objective ground of dao. Western "ideas" are analogous to mental pictographs in a language of

thought. The composite pictures formed out of these mental images (beliefs) were the mental counterparts of facts. Truth was "correspondence" between the picture and the fact. Pictures play a role in Chinese folk theory of language but not of mind. Chinese understood their written characters as having evolved from pictographs. They had scant reason to think of grammatical strings of characters as "pictures" of anything. Chinese folk linguistics recognized that history and community usage determined the reference of the characters. They did not appeal to the pictographic quality or any associated mental image individuals might have. Language and conventions are valuable because they store inherited guidance. The social-historical tradition, not individual

psychology, grounds meaning. Some thinkers became skeptical of claims about the sages and the "constancy" of their guidance, but they did not abandon the assumption that public language guides us. Typically, they either advocated reforming the guiding discourse (dao) or reverting to "natural," pre-linguistic behavior patterns. Language rested neither on cognition nor private, individual subjectivity. Chinese philosophy of mind played mainly an application (execution of instructions) role in Chinese theory of language. Chinese theory of language centered on counterparts of reference or denotation. To have mastered a term was for the xin and senses working together to be able to distinguish or divide realities "correctly." ?Correctly? was the rub