Chad Hansen

Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and “Truth”

Pre-Han philosophical tradition did not address issues for which the concept of truth was central. Classical Chinese philosophy had virtually no metaphysical theory. The theory of language was mainly pragmatic. The semantic doctrines that were developed focused on terms rather than sentences or sententials. The Chinese theory of knowledge was primarily a theory of know-how and was not based on contrast between knowledge and belief. Chinese philosophy of mind treated heart-mind as a cluster of dispositional attitudes to make distinctions and to act upon, not as a repository of cognitive content about the world. Discussions of inference and semantic paradoxes used explicitly pragmatic terms rather than semantic ones. These differences can be partially explained by features of classical Chinese language in which compositional sentencehood is not important or syntactically obvious, and in which the counterparts of propositional attitudes take terms rather than sentences as objects.

Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas

I t began with the Phoenicians . Most written languages now use their invention— a phonetic alphabet. The invention of alphabetic writing escorted an influential theory of language onto the intellectual stage. Aristotle expressed the basic outline of that theory, which has since dominated Indo-European views of language: Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of the spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of—affections in the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of— actual things-are also the same.