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Can the Subaltern Speak?

Chapter 5

Case Analysis IV: A Cross-Tradition Examination—Philosophical Concern with Truth in Classical Daoism

It is philosophically interesting and signiﬁcant to explore the philosophical concern with truth from a vantage point that crosses traditions, instead of looking at it exclusively within one single philosophical tradition (i.e., the Western philosophical tradition). Such exploration can not only enhance our understanding of the nature, scope and characteristics of the philosophical concern with truth but also provide alternative perspectives to our treatment of some of the involved issues. Clearly, the current essay has neither space nor capacity to exhaustively examine all the relevant endeavors in various philosophical traditions. I will focus on the case in the Chinese philosophical tradition. This focus has one more reason: it is especially philosophically interesting and signiﬁcant to explore the case in Chinese philosophy for the following consideration. As I will introduce below, some scholars argue that the dominant concern in classical Chinese philosophy is the dao ( ) concern which is essentially different from the truth concern and thus that there is no signiﬁcant truth concern in classical Chinese philosophy. In view of this challenge, I focus further on the case of philosophical Daoism whose dao concern is a trademark of the dao concern of classical Chinese philosophy. Arguably, the exploration of the relation between the truth concern and the dao concern of philosophical Daoism will substantially contribute to our understanding of the nature, scope and characteristics of the philosophical concern with truth. As far as the relation of the current chapter to the preceding chapters is concerned, on the one hand, the discussions in the preceding chapters provide necessary theoretical preparation in several ways to be explained. On the other hand, as I will argue in the subsequent sections, the examination in the current chapter will not only enhance our understanding of, and illustrate, some relevant points made in the preceding chapters, but also contribute to our understanding and treatment of the philosophical concern with truth in some philosophically interesting connections. In the following, in Section 5.1, I will give a background introduction regarding the truth concern and the dao concern. This will involve referring to some seemingly plausible observations related to evaluating the due status of the truth concern in Chinese philosophy, presenting some relevant challenging questions, and explaining my strategy of treating what is at issue. In Sections 5.2 and 5.3, I examine the relation of the dao concern and the truth concern in classical Daoism. In Section 5.2,

B. Mou, Substantive Perspectivism, Synthese Library 344, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2623-1_5, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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I focus on Lao Zi’s case in the Dao-De-Jing, while in Section 5.3, I focus on Zhuang Zi’s case. In Section 5.4, I explore the situation of the truth-predicate-like phrases in the classical Chinese language in view of those reﬂective points previously made regarding the truth concern in philosophical Daoism. With a due background introduction in Section 5.1, I will further elaborate my strategy at the end of that section.

5.1 Truth Concern and Dao Concern
It seems that the truth concern, generally speaking, and the truth pursuit, specifically speaking, is a dominant concern and pursuit in the Western tradition while the dao concern, generally speaking, and the dao pursuit, speciﬁcally speaking, is a dominant concern and pursuit in the Chinese tradition. What is the relation between the truth concern and the dao concern? Are they dramatically and totally different reﬂective concerns in philosophy? It seems to some authors1 that traditional Chinese philosophy, especially the pre-Han Chinese philosophy,2 is not concerned with truth. This conclusion has been drawn based on some seemingly plausible observations or claims as follows. (1) It seems to be the dao, instead of truth, that assumes the primary explanatory norm to regulate one central goal of philosophical inquiries in classical Chinese philosophy. (2) In traditional Chinese philosophy, there appears neither conscious investigation of a general deﬁnitional issue of ‘What is truth?’ in meta-discourse nor conscious ‘semantic ascent’ examination of the function, and its philosophical relevance, of the truth predicate (if any). (3) It seems hard to ﬁnd a uniﬁed Chinese character in the pre-Han classical period that would serve as an exact counterpart of ‘truth’/‘true’ in, say, English. (4) Some scholars argue that the dominant portion of classical Chinese philosophy is non-sentential philosophy in contrast to what is called ‘Western sentential philosophy’ and thus not essentially related to those concepts that are intrinsically connected with sentential philosophy like proposition (or semantic content), truth and belief.3 (5) The signiﬁcant part and the primary concern of classical Chinese philosophy have been considered to be its moral concern and its ethical accounts; and the moral concern is not with how to understand and capture the impersonal material world but with the ethical constitution in the human society. In this way, there are two different dominant notions of truth in the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions: while the former is a cross-categorical ‘way-things-are capturing’ or ‘conformity to reality’ one, the latter is some other notion. There are three variants of this kind of approach, which distinguish from each other via their distinctive identiﬁcations of what ‘some other notion’ means. One is its ‘truth-as-pragmatic-notion’ variant; this variant deems that it is a pragmatic account of truth (if any) that plays the role.4 Another is its ‘truth-as-a property of persons’ variant; this variant takes it that the Chinese tradition, typically,

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takes truth as a property of persons and thus ties truth to persons.5 The third one is its ‘truth-as-what really is’ variant; this variant takes truth as ‘a state of being itself’ or as ‘existence with the highest value and ultimate meaning’.6 Based on one or more of the preceding ﬁve observations or considerations, some scholars of Chinese philosophy have concluded that there is no signiﬁcant concern with truth (as capturing the way things are or correspondence with reality) or with semantic truth in classical Chinese philosophy. Let me call this claim ‘the thesis of no-truth-concern in Chinese philosophy’, or, simply, ‘the NTCP thesis’ : (NTCP) There is no signiﬁcant concern with truth (as capturing the way things are) in classical Chinese philosophy. As suggested in the ﬁrst observation above, it is agreed that a signiﬁcant concern, or even the central concern, in classical Chinese philosophy is with the dao, whatever the term dao would mean in distinctive movements of thought in classical Chinese philosophy. The NTCP thesis thus presupposes (or, in some cases, implies) a sister claim, the NTCP thesis∗ , to the effect that the truth concern and the dao concern are essentially different or even opposing reﬂective concerns that render the two major philosophical traditions signiﬁcantly or even totally different in orientation and agenda. It is noted that these views have been voiced prominently and loudly especially in the West and thus have left many who are not familiar with Chinese philosophy under the impression that there is no truth concern in classical Chinese philosophy and that the truth concern in the Western tradition and the dao concern in Chinese tradition are dramatically different from each other. Indeed, the philosophical concern with truth has been considered as one perennial central concern in philosophy. Such a concern has been traditionally identiﬁed as conscious endeavor to explicitly, directly, and systematically answer various truth-or-‘true’-related questions, ‘What is truth?’ or ‘What is the function of the truth predicate?’ among others, in meta-discourse, resulting in various theories or accounts of truth. Such endeavor that reveals itself in an explicit, direct and systematic manner is often taken as the deciding indication of the philosophical concern with truth in a philosophical tradition. Judged by this, the philosophical concern with truth is viewed as one primary concern throughout the history of Western philosophy—from Socrates and Plato to contemporary Western philosophy today. However, measured in the same way, it appears that classical Chinese philosophy, as the foregoing NTCP thesis claims, is not concerned with truth; for, in traditional Chinese philosophy, there appears neither conscious investigation of ‘What is truth?’ in meta-discourse nor conscious ‘semantic ascent’ examination of the function, and its philosophical relevance, of the truth predicate. From this one might draw one of the following three conclusions: (1) traditional Chinese philosophy is not philosophy, if the concern with truth is indeed one identifying characteristic of philosophizing, and if such a concern should be characterized in the aforementioned way; (2) the truth-concern thesis is not a global but local one; it is valid only for Western philosophy but inapplicable to the case of Chinese philosophy; (3) the ‘incumbent’ understanding of the identiﬁcation and formulation of the philosophical

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concern with truth is seriously limited, and some other distinct approaches to the issue of truth have been ignored. Because, at least to many familiar with Chinese philosophy as well as Western philosophy, the ﬁrst alternative conclusion is arguably false, I do not intend to discuss the ﬁrst alternative in this writing. Instead, I focus on the third alternative, which is philosophically more interesting and signiﬁcant, and, in so doing, I also respond to the second alternative. Indeed, the issue addressed in (3) is not trivial or merely the matter of deﬁnition; rather, it is signiﬁcant for three reasons. First, such discussion might lead to doing justice to distinct ways in which the philosophical concern with truth reveals itself in the global context. Second, such discussion would contribute to the idea that different approaches to the issue of truth in different philosophical traditions could seriously learn from, and complement, each other. Third, an examination of the characteristics of the truth predicate in an ideographic language like Chinese might shed light on the relation between the concept of truth and its linguistic expression. Let me straighten up my own position on the issue. I disagree with both of the foregoing theses, the NTCP thesis and its sister claim, the NTCP thesis∗ . My view consists of three related points. First, the dao pursuit of classical Daoism is essentially the truth pursuit in the way as captured by the point of the TNG thesis, although the truth pursuit manifests itself in distinctive ways in the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. Second, the NTCP thesis is thus untenable; that is, the truth concern via truth pursuit is indeed one signiﬁcant concern in classical Daoism. Third, one signiﬁcant layer of the dao concern, i.e., the truth-pursuing agent layer of the truth concern, as suggested in Zhuang Zi’s approach, has made a signiﬁcant contribution to the common truth concern in philosophy. The connection of the three points is this: The second point is based on the ﬁrst point; the ﬁrst point is presupposed in the third point; the ﬁrst and second points are further strengthened and enriched by the third point. My strategy to argue for the foregoing points and respond to the aforementioned different views in this chapter consists of the following related approaches. (1) It is known that classical Chinese philosophy is not a single philosophical school but consists of a variety of distinctive movements of thought; it is neither necessary due to the purpose here nor practical due to the space limitation to examine all of the various versions of the dao concern in different movements of thought throughout classical Chinese philosophy. Rather, I will focus on the relation between the truth pursuit and the dao pursuit in view of classical Daoism as prominently presented by Lao Zi in the Dao-De-Jing and Zhuang Zi in the Zhuang-Zi. For any general claims concerning classical Chinese philosophy not merely cannot ignore the case of Daoism, but rather need to bring it in focus, especially with regard to the issue of the dao-concern. In so doing, I do not pretend to exhaust all the orientations and styles of the dao-concern in classical Chinese philosophy (such as that in Confucianism). (2) More concretely speaking, in Section 5.2 concerning Lao Zi’s case, I start with, and focus primarily on, examining whether or not, and how, the common pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth (or such a fundamental concern with the ‘capturing-and-making-true’ dual-directional relation between the subjective and the objective) is prominently and reﬂectively presented

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in the reﬂective context of the Dao-De-Jing, no matter how it is expressed via the conceptual and linguistic resources in the classical text. I argue that the dao pursuit of classical Daoism is essentially the truth pursuit in one crucial dimension; this is captured by the point of the TNG thesis that has been discussed in the last chapter: both render the pursuit of capturing the world (the way things, as due objects of studies, are) normative in regulating a strategic goal of philosophical inquiries. I further show how classical Daoism as presented in the Daoist classical texts, the Dao-DeJing, can make its substantial contribution to our understanding of the truth concern in philosophically interesting ways. (3) In Section 5.3 concerning Zhuang Zi’s case, both for the sake of strengthening the case for the relevant points made in Section 5.2 and for the sake of spelling out some of Zhuang Zi’s distinct contributions to the common truth concern in philosophy, I focus on Zhuang Zi’s account of the true agent and true knowledge which is related to the truth-pursuing agent aspect of the truth concern. (4) In Section 5.4, moving from the reﬂective dao-language deliverance of the truth concern in philosophical Daoism onto the folk language deliverance of the folk notion of truth in the classical Chinese language, I examine how the latter bears on the former through a linguistic and conceptual analysis. (5) In the aforementioned ways, my strategy of responding to the opponents’ views on the issue is to look directly at the adequacy of the aforementioned seemingly plausible observations on which the competing views build their cases for the NTCP thesis; I then positively argue for my view on some involved key issues in the foregoing manner, instead of directly criticizing the opponents’ views.

5.2 Truth Pursuit as Dao Pursuit in the Dao-De-Jing
It is known that one central strategic goal of classical Daoism is to understand and capture the dao or pursue the dao. Now what is the dao? The dao is not something mysterious beyond the human understanding. The dao, as characterized in the DaoDe-Jing, is primarily the metaphysical dao; Lao Zi characterizes the metaphysical dao as follows. The dao as root is fundamental (the Dao-De-Jing, Chapters 1, 6, 21, 25, 34, and 42); the dao as origin is universal in the sense that it is the origin of all things (op. cit., Chapters 1, 25, 34, 40, and 42); the dao is the one (and one unifying force that runs through the whole universe) in the above two senses; the dao as power is inherent in nature (in each thing of the universe) rather than transcendent beyond and above nature (op. cit., Chapter 42); the dao as source is never exhausted (op. cit., Chapters 4 and 6); the dao as whole is nature (in the above senses combined); the dao as the way of nature is the way of yin-yang complementary interaction to reach harmonious balance (op. cit., Chapters 2, 42, and 77); the dao as the way of existence in time is eternal (op. cit., Chapters 4 and 6); the dao as the way of existence mode evolves itself and keep changing dynamically (op. cit., Chapter 1); the dao as the way of dynamic development is spontaneous and natural (because the dao is nature) (op. cit., Chapters 25 and 34). In this way, the metaphysical dao is not something like the platonic Form beyond and above, but consists in, particular things in the universe; all particular things in

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nature, wan-wu ( ten-thousand things) (op. cit., Chapters 4, 5, 8, 16, 34, 37, 42, 62, and 64), are manifestations of the metaphysical dao with individualized) way of particularized daos within that render them power. The yin-yang ( thinking bears on the classical Daoist understanding of the relation between the metaphysical dao and its manifestations in wan-wu, or de ( ) in a broad sense: their relation is essentially yin-yang complementary at the metaphysical level in the sense that the dao and wan-wu are not separate and independent of each other but interdependent, interpenetrating and interactive in regard to metaphysical constitution and function, although the force and existence of the metaphysical dao cannot be simply reduced to the sum of (the forces and existences of) wan-wu. Epistemologically speaking, the metaphysical dao can thus be (partially) captured in our thought and language through capturing wan-wu.7 The metaphysical dao is thus not something mysterious, which neither metaphysically exists beyond and above nature nor epistemologically goes beyond human understanding. In our pre-theoretic terms, the dao is the universe as nature together with its way instead of something mysterious beyond nature; to pursue the dao is to understand and capture the way things are in nature. It is also important to note that pursuing the dao in the human society does not necessarily imply conforming to a pre-ﬁxed path; the point is that any path per se that the dao-pursuing agent is currently paving is expected to be in accordance with, or capture, the way things are in nature. Daoism takes pursuing, modeling on, and performing the dao as the fundamental mission of the human being in their reﬂective inquiry. As Lao Zi emphatically points out: ‘The human being models (fa ) him/herself upon earth; earth models itself upon heaven; heaven models itself upon the dao; the dao models itself upon what is natural’ (op. cit., Chapter 25). In this way, the dao pursuit is the most fundamental dao concern of classical Daoism. If my view about the nature and function of the TNG thesis as given in the previous part and my account of the nature and mission of the dao concern of philosophical Daoism are right, the dao-pursuing mission of classical Daoism in the above sense is essentially a kind of truth-pursuit mission which can be delivered in terms of a Daoist way of presenting the TNG thesis as follows: (TNG∗∗∗ ) The Daoist reﬂective way of presenting the explanatory-reduction version of the thesis of truth centrality as a (strategic) normative goal: Capturing dao (the term ‘dao’ designates the way things are) is an explanatory norm to regulate and explain one central strategic goal of philosophical inquiries; or, simply: The dao pursuit is an explanatory norm to regulate and explain one central strategic goal of philosophical inquiries. Several explanatory notes are due. First, the distinction between use and mention needs to be paid attention to in this context. The phrase ‘the paraphrase-explanatoryreduction version’ is mentioned only in contrast to ‘the semantic-ascent version’ which is a by-default version in the West tradition but whose counterpart can be hardly found in the literature of classical Chinese philosophy. Nevertheless, here

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the phrase ‘the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version’ is used to refer to what it is supposed to refer to, i.e., its content to the effect that capturing the way things (as due objects of philosophical studies) are is taken as an explanatory norm to regulate and explain one central strategic goal of philosophical inquiries. In this way, what the Daoist way of presenting the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version presents is such a content, instead of presupposing the presence of (the counterpart of) the semantic-ascent version in classical Chinese philosophy. Second, one might object: isn’t the Daoist understanding of dao so different from some typical or representative understanding of reality or the way things are in the West that the preceding so-called Daoist reﬂective way, (TNG∗∗∗ ), of presenting the TNG thesis actually talks about something else? As explained in Section 4.4 of the previous chapter, and as I will further explain in the next section, our pre-theoretic understanding of truth and the TNG thesis themselves do not intrinsically commit themselves to any ad hoc metaphysical account or elaboration of reality (i.e., on what counts as reality), and therefore their metaphysical commitment is minimal in this connection. Rather, the TNG thesis is compatible with, and allows for, various reﬂective ways of presenting it given that these various ways are reﬂective ways of talking about the way things are—the Daoist way of talking about the dao is one of these ways. It is noted that, although, practically speaking, a thesis or account concerning truth (capturing dao) might be put forward together with (or with due implication of) some ontological claims concerning what counts as reality (dao), the thesis or account is actually a combination of a thesis or account of truth itself and an ontological view of what counts as reality (dao), a point to be further explained in Section 6.3.1. It is important to notice that, theoretically speaking, a thesis or account of truth cannot be conﬂated with an ontological doctrine of what counts as reality (dao). A Daoist elaboration of (TNG∗∗∗ ) into a metaphysically-loaded account is not the same as (TNG∗∗∗ ) per se but actually the combination of a Daoist way of presenting the TNG thesis via (TNG∗∗∗ ), which is ontologically neutral concerning what counts as dao, and a Daoist metaphysical account of what counts as dao without conceptually conﬂating each with the other. Third, related to the point of the preceding remarks, it is also noted that we might as well replace the Daoist reﬂective way of talking about the way things are with one Chinese pre-theoretic way of talking about the way things are via such folk phrases ). A reﬂective way of talking about qiu-dao ( ) and a as shi-shi-qiu-shi ( folk way of talking about shi-shi-qiu-shi, which I will further explain in Section 5.4 below, are both distinctive Chinese ways of delivering the point of the TNG thesis. Fourth, while Davidson actually subscribes to the paraphrase-explanatoryreduction version of the TNG thesis in an implicit and indirect way, classical Daoism explicitly and directly delivers the point of the thesis through its characteristic dao-pursuing version that captures the crux of the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version of the thesis. Now one issue emerges: given that classical Daoism’s daopursuing strategic goal captures the point of the TNG thesis through (TNG∗∗∗ ) and thus that the dao pursuit in classical Daoism is the truth pursuit in the way as captured by the point of the TNG thesis, does classical Daoism make any substantial contribution through (TNG∗∗∗ ) to our reﬂective understanding of the truth

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concern? Now it is time to explore merits (if any) of each of the two characteristic versions of the TNG thesis. Generally speaking, each of the two versions of the TNG thesis has its own merits (and actual or potential disadvantages in contrast to the other’s merits). The semantic-ascent version talks about truth in an economic and convenient way by using a one-word term ‘truth’ with merely one syllable instead of using some multiple-syllable phrases like ‘[a certain truth bearer] in accordance with or correspondence to [a certain] fact’. Another merit of the semantic-ascent version is this: what is (or is supposed to be) shared, or something common, stable, deﬁnite, constant, unchanged and universal, in all concrete and particular states of (various truth bearers) capturing or corresponding to the ways things are in the world is highlighted and emphasized in terms of one word ‘be true’ or ‘truth’ via such semantic ascent. In the philosophical context, this approach actually reﬂects a general being-aspect-concerned orientation of Western tradition: it tends to focus on the being aspect of an object of study, that is, the aspect of the object that is stable and invariable, unchangeable, deﬁnite and constant—i.e., the being aspect; when what is involved is to capture what is stable, constant and invariable among a number of objects of one kind, this orientation thus tends to focus on what is shared, common and thus universal among them. A reﬂective perspective that is intended to capture such an orientation to look at an object of study or a number of objects that are somehow related might as well be called ‘the being-aspect-concerned perspective’. In this way, one can say that, besides the aforementioned consideration for economy and convenience, the semantic-ascent version of the thesis of truth centrality as a (strategic) normative goal more or less reﬂects such a being-aspect-concerned orientation or perspective. If the ﬁrst merit is more or less instrumental in character, the second merit is quite substantial in nature. In contrast, one merit of the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version is that it delivers the substantial content of truth pursuit in an explicit, straightforward and illuminative way. Another merit is this: the key phrase, ‘capturing the way things are,’ not merely delivers the substantial content of truth pursuit but also implies or points to the concrete and particular aspect of truth pursuit. Generally speaking, there is some distinct aspect(s) between the way one thing is and the way another thing is; therefore, generally speaking, the way of capturing the way one thing is different from that way of capturing the way another thing is. One certainly cannot say that this version thus loses sight of, or is inconsistent with, the general and universal aspect of truth pursuit: the phrase ‘capturing the way things are’ is an abstract and generalization: what is common among many different truth bearers is that they capture the way things are. Notice that the apparent singular term ‘way’ used in the paraphrase-explanatory-deduction version actually covers both ways: one might as well say that it is used both as a collective noun to cover various particular ways things are and as an abstract term to grasp the general character or shared dimension of all these particular ways of capturing. In this connection, given the speciﬁed meaning of ‘(metaphysical) dao’ in classical Daoism as characterized before, the Daoist dao-pursuing way of presenting the TNG thesis, as a variant of the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version in regard to content, hits the point of

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the uniﬁcation of both ways. If my preceding discussions of the distinction between the two versions of the TNG thesis and of their respective merits in regard to orientation are correct, I consider this as one substantial contribution by Daoism to our reﬂective understanding of the truth concern in philosophical inquiries. There is one more merit of the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version that is already brieﬂy addressed in one note on (TNG∗∗∗ ): while the semantic-ascent version by default suggests a non-agent thing as a ‘truth bearer’ like a sentence, statement, belief or proposition, the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version suggests, or at least is compatible with, the human agent as a primary truth bearer in a certain context to this extent: it is eventually the human agent who ‘understands’ or ‘captures’ the way things are in the world and thus who generates, possesses and uniﬁes various true beliefs and thoughts that she actually has. It is noted that the dao-pursuing is not limited to a relatively stable understanding of the world; it also includes the agent’s dynamic understanding and her practicing the understanding going without being against dynamic via her action that is regulated by wu-wei ( nature). The point and signiﬁcance of this merit will be explained in the next section when Zhuang Zi’s relevant ideal is discussed. In the following, to further understand and illustrate the truth pursuit in the DaoDe-Jing (that is, how the Daoist classic text raises some reﬂectively interesting issues in this connection and how it responds to these issues in some reﬂectively interesting ways if any), let me give a case analysis of one passage in the DaoDe-Jing that raises some philosophically interesting issues concerning the truth/dao pursuit. The passage is from Chapter 54 as follows (my translation): Cultivates virtue within oneself as a whole body and it thus becomes authentic (true) [zhen ]; Cultivates virtue in one’s family and that thus becomes to overﬂow; Cultivates virtue in one’s village and it thus becomes long-lasting; Cultivates virtue in one’s state and it thus becomes abundant; Cultivates virtue in the world and it thus becomes universal. Therefore, look at the oneself by virtue of the oneself; Look at the family by virtue of the family; Look at the village by virtue of the village; Look at the state by virtue of the state; Look at the world by virtue of the world. How do I know the world as it is? By virtue of this. As I see it, there are four interesting points concerning the truth pursuit in this short passage. First, Lao Zi here both implicitly makes his metaphysical point concerning truth nature as well as explicitly makes his epistemological point concerning truth means in line with our pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth. In the second part of this citation, Lao Zi explicitly raises the issue of how ); the criterion to know the world as it is (he-yi-zhi-tian-xia-zhi-ran or means by virtue of which one can know that, according to Lao Zi, is to exam-

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ine (guan ) the object of knowledge (whether it is the human being oneself or family or state or other things in the world) by virtue of the way the object is in the world. (Surely, as we have seen above, Davidson would disagree due to some epistemological difﬁculties well known in the Western tradition; nevertheless, for a classical Daoist like Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, one can somehow know the world as it is through, say, joint functions by various knowing organs which are not limited to those inter-subjective ones like our senses and intellectual mind)8 . In so doing, with the dual meaning of zhi ( knowing as the process of knowledge and what is known as the result of knowledge), Lao Zi as a matter of fact makes his metaphysical point concerning truth nature which is to be possessed by the result of knowing: ). the resulting knowledge captures the world as it is (zhi-tian-xia-zhi-ran Note that, in so doing, Lao Zi does not use any one-Chinese-character counterpart, if any, of the one-syllable-word in Western phonetic languages (say, ‘true’ or ‘truth’ in English)—as a semantic-ascent linguistic means of indicating truth nature—to deliver his insight concerning the truth/dao pursuit. This is one point that this essay is intended to make: the truth concern, generally speaking, and the truth pursuit, speciﬁcally speaking, are not necessarily related to any ad hoc semantic-ascent linguistic means whose meaning depends on its due paraphrase explanation. Second, it is interesting enough to note that the Chinese character zhen ( ), whose current usage in contemporary Chinese language has made it become a by-default one-character Chinese counterpart of English term ‘truth’ or ‘true’, does appear in the ﬁrst statement in the cited passage: ‘Cultivates virtue within oneself and it ]’; the other thus becomes genuine [xiu-zhi-yu-shen qi-de-nai-zhen occurrence of the character zhen in the Dao-De-Jing is in Chapter 21: ‘[Dao] Deep and far off, there is the essence within; The essence is highly authentic (true) [qi], and there is evidence within.’ Now what is at issue is how jing-shen-zhen to understand and interpret the meaning of zhen in the above contexts. It seems that zhen is open to two distinctive interpretations in the above contexts. One way is to interpret zhen as a noun-like expression meaning what really is.9 Another way is to interpret zhen as a predicate meaning reaching or capturing the way things are. It is arguably right that the latter interpretation provides better explanation than the former does for several considerations. First, grammatically speaking, it is clear that zhen functions as a predicate expression, instead of a noun-like expression, in the above two ﬁrst-order reﬂective contexts; they are used to assign a certain attribute to the subjects. Second, it is also clear that the latter interpretation is most close to, or almost the same as, its basic modern sense (i.e., capturing or ﬁt fact or reality), while there is an obvious gap between the former interpretation and the basic modern sense; the former interpretation thus owes us an explanation of why there is such a substantial meaning gap between the alleged sense of zhen here and its basic modern sense. Third, the latter interpretation is much in accordance with the fundamental mission of the dao pursuit (to understand and capture the dao as the way things are) of the Dao-De-Jing. Indeed, the logical subject of zhen, or the zhen bearer, in these two cases is neither the linguistic sentence or statement nor the propositional content of thought or belief; but, at least in the context of the Daoist classic Dao-De-Jing, it is arguably right to say that zhen is used to indicate something like reaching or capturing (a high level of) the way things are. In the case of Chapter

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54, only when virtue is cultivated within oneself [via wu-wei], the alleged virtue genuine virtue, a kind of becomes virtue, which, one can say, means shang-de ( high level of spontaneous virtue) (cf. the Dao-De-Jing, Chapter 38) and which is thus a kind of the way the genuine human virtue is. In the case of Chapter 21, the dao as essence and power of wan-wu ‘highly’ reaches the very way the nature is, which is the dao. In this way, although the ancient usage of the term zhen here is distinctive from its primary modern usage as a counterpart of ‘true’ and ‘truth’, what it delivers is essentially along the same line as what our pre-theoretic understanding of truth is to deliver, that is, (the truth bearer) reaching or capturing the way things are. To this extent, it is not implausible or too odd to translate the two occurrences of zhen in the Dao-De-Jing into ‘true’, instead of ‘genuine’ in the former case and ‘authentic’ in the latter case. It is noted that the thesis of the dao pursuit as the truth pursuit of capturing the way things are is established on the basis of examining the nature of the dao pursuit and its relation to our pre-theoretic understanding of truth, instead of being based on what zhen means in the Dao-De-Jing. Therefore, even if the former interpretation of zhen is correct, that would not constitute a refutation of the thesis. Nevertheless, as discussed above, it is arguably right that the latter interpretation provides better explanation of the meaning of zhen in the context of the Dao-De-Jing that is in accordance with the pre-theoretic understanding of truth. Third, another interesting issue concerning the truth pursuit raised in the passage is that of the truth of human morality. From Lao Zi’s point of view, the human morality in terms of human virtue, as indicated by the term de used in the narrow sense in the Dao-De-Jing, is not something like ﬁxed ﬂoating entity that can be imposed upon the moral agent from outside but is cultivated ‘within and through ). In accordance [the moral agent] oneself as a whole body’ (xiu-zhi-yu-shen with the broad sense of de referring to manifestations of the metaphysical dao, or individualized daos, in particular things, de as human virtue is the manifestation of metaphysical dao in human beings regarding morality, which renders human beings having ‘power’. In this sense, from Lao Zi’s Daoist point of view, it is not only that the truth of a moral judgment, say, ‘Mary is a moral person with virtue’, has its objective basis that consists in its capturing the way the moral agent is in regard to her cultivated virtue within and through herself as a whole body. But it is also that the truth of the moral agent’s virtue itself has its objective basis that consists in its following or ‘modeling itself on’ (fa ) (Chapter 25) the dao in the way of wu-wei (a Daoist way of presenting the point of capturing the way things are in this context). (It is noted that the latter insight above actually provides a due basis for explaining how it is possible for human virtue to possess truth, an issue that is induced by ]’ in his ﬁrst Lao Zi’s idea ‘[human virtue] thus becomes true [qi-de-nai-zhen statement of the cited passage, as mentioned in the preceding second point.) In this way, Lao Zi’s dao-pursuing approach does not exclude but intrinsically includes the moral-truth pursuit in the above sense. Fourth, the foregoing second and third points are actually related to another interesting issue concerning the truth pursuit in philosophy, i.e., the issue of eligible truth bearers, as already more or less addressed in the preceding discussions of the two points. The crux of the issue is this: given that truth nature consists in capturing the

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way things are, whether due (primary) truth bearers can be only such mental things with conceptual contents as thoughts and beliefs and their linguistic expressions like sentences and statements or can also be other human things like human virtue and the human agent herself as a whole, and how those aforementioned truth-bearer candidates if any are related. Lao Zi indirectly makes his positive point concerning this issue as he favorably talks about both kinds of truth bearers. Let me further address the issue of the human agent as a truth bearer in the next section where I discuss how another important classical Daoist philosopher, Zhuang Zi, explicitly addresses the issue in his account of the true agent and true knowledge. Before moving onto the subject of the next section on Zhaung Zi’s account, let me give a brief summary of the central point that I have endeavored to make in this section. As explained in the previous chapter, through an explanatory reduction of the truth property to what the term ‘truth’ is used to really talked about along the lines of our pre-theoretic understanding of truth, the paraphrase-explanatoryreduction version of the TNG thesis hits the point in regard to exactly what counts as an explanatory norm to regulate one central strategic goal of philosophical inquiries. In so doing, the explanatory-reduction version of the TNG thesis has another significant role in capturing a due cross-tradition understanding of the nature and scope of the truth concern in different philosophical traditions: it would help us identify and characterize the truth concern in Chinese philosophical tradition in view of classical Daoism. Although the trademark version of the TNG thesis is its semantic-ascent version especially in the Western tradition, and although the semantic-ascent version does have its merits, the paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version of the thesis is more illuminative and to the point in one crucial aspect. The dao pursuit of classical Daoism is essentially the truth pursuit in general terms, though it is presented in classical Daoism in a distinct way. To further understand and illustrate the truth pursuit in the Daoist classic text Dao-De-Jing, I have then given a case analysis of one passage from Chapter 54, which, as I see it, explicitly or implicitly makes some philosophically interesting points concerning the truth pursuit in philosophy.

5.3 Zhuang Zi on True Agent and True Knowledge: An Account of Truth-Pursuing-Agent Dimension of Truth Concern
In the preceding section, when I give a general characterization of the dao concern as the truth concern of philosophical Daoism and a case analysis of one passage of the Dao-De-Jing, both discussions end with one point that is somehow related to Zhuang Zi’s account of truth-pursuing agent, which in my opinion constitutes one signiﬁcant contribution by Daoism to our understanding of the truth concern. Before looking at Zhuang Zi’s account on this issue, to have a due understanding of it, one needs to ﬁrst understand Zhuang Zi’s general methodological strategy, ) methodological stratwhich might as well be called ‘things-equality’ (qi-wu egy. This is a kind of objective perspectivism,10 which consists of two signiﬁcant and related points, as I see it.11 (1) Each thing has its various aspects, and one

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can take a ﬁnite perspective [as a working perspective] to look at one aspect: one can look at its this aspect, from a this-aspect-concern perspective, and sees it as a this, and one can also look at its that aspect, from a that-aspect-concern perspective, and sees it as a that. Its metaphysical foundation is this: various aspects, the this aspect and the that aspect, ontologically depend on each other; various perspectives, the this-aspect-concern perspective and the that-aspect-concern perspective, thus actually complement each other. (2) For the purpose of looking at the connection of various aspects of a thing and/or of having a comprehensive understanding of the thing, Zhuang Zi also encourages us to look at things from a higher point of view that transcends various ﬁnite points of view; in this way, those different aspects cease to be viewed as opposite or incompatible but complementary. That is, Zhuang Zi emphasizes a global or holistic understanding of the world that transcends various local perspectives (at least in one’s background thinking), though it is totally legitimate or even is expected for one to take a certain local perspective as working perspective depending on one’s purpose and focus. With the understanding of these two strategic methodological points of Zhuang Zi’s objective perspectivism, one can effectively understand Zhuang Zi’s substantial approaches to various issues including the current issue under examination: one might as well say that the latter constitute implementations and illustrations of the former. In the following, to enable the reader to have a close look at Zhuang Zi’s original narrative account of the true agent and true knowledge, I ﬁrst make the citations of some relevant passages from Inner Chapter 6 “Da-Zong-Shi” of the Zhuang-Zi with certain needed paraphrases in bracket parentheses; and then I give an interpretation of Zhuang Zi’s relevant points in the context of Daoism and of his whole thought, especially in view of his general methodological strategy to look at various issues as characterized above. Now let us take a close look at how Zhuang Zi makes his point in the text.12
The one who knows what Heaven [Tian] does and what the human does has reached the utmost. The one who knows what Heaven does live with the Heaven. The person who knows what the human does use the knowledge of what one knows to support the knowledge of what one does not know, and one thus completes one’s natural span of life without dying young half way [completely following the dao without failing half way]. This is knowledge at its greatness. However, there is one difﬁculty. Knowledge must have what it waits for [as its objective basis] and be then applicable, and what it waits for is changeable. How can I know that what I call ‘Heaven’ is not really the human, and what I call ‘the human’ is not really Heaven? [The key to overcome this difﬁculty is this.] One needs to ﬁrst become a true agent [zhen-ren ] and thus has one’s true knowledge [zhen-zhi ] [that would be sensitive to what is changeable]. What is meant by a ‘true agent’? The true agent in ancient times did not reject [but were sensitive to] what is little, did not brag about achievements, and did not scheme things [against being natural]. A man like this would not regret it when missing something and would not be complacent when having achievements. A man like this would not feel frightened when climbing the high places, would not feel soaked when entering the water, and would not feel hot when going through ﬁre. [He would not be restricted by apparent limits but transcend them with his vision.] Such is the knowledge by which one can climb all way up on the course of the dao. . ..

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The true agent in ancient times . . . regarded knowledge as product of time and de as what is based on . . .. [For the true agent] To regard knowledge as product of time means that he needs to respond to situations and changes as if he could not keep from doing it. To regard de as what is based on is as if the one with two feet needs to walk on one’s way to climb a hill, and the true agent makes his diligent efforts to do so . . .. The person who is called a ‘true agent’ renders Heaven and the human in accord instead of overcoming each other.

Indeed, given that the English term ‘true’ is used here in line with our pre-theoretic understanding of truth, it does not appear immediately plausible to talk about ‘the true agent’ or translate zhen-ren into ‘the true agent’. For, after all, we usually consider the bearer of truth to be such mental things as thoughts and beliefs or their linguistic expressions like sentences and statements. (I guess that, with this consideration as a presupposition, some translations avoid translating the term zhen in zhen-ren here into ‘true’ but some terms else, such as ‘authentic’ or ‘genuine’.) However, with the foregoing analysis and clariﬁcation of the point of the TNG thesis via its paraphrase-explanatory-reduction version, and if my account there is correct, one thing is certain: given that the truth (nature) as delivered in our pre-theoretic understanding of truth consists in (the truth bearer) capturing the way things are, it should be neither implausible nor odd to talk about ‘the true agent’ when ‘true’ is along the line of our pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth. For it indeed makes sense to say that the subject (or even the primary subject in a certain sense to be explained below) of capturing the way things are is the human agent, or the thinking creature, instead of some non-thinking thing.13 But, at this point, two further questions emerge. First, does Zhuang Zi’ talk about (mention) zhen-ren in the sense of zhen that delivers the pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth? Second, given that it is plausible or does make sense to interpret Zhuang Zi’s talk about zhen-ren into the talk about ‘the true agent’ in this context, is there any serious reﬂective need or any theoretic signiﬁcance to highlight the conception of the true agent as Zhuang Zi does? Or is this just a kind of insigniﬁcant, though innocent, rhetoric saying? As for the ﬁrst question, it is arguably right that, in this context, Zhuang Zi relates ‘true knowledge’ with ‘the true agent’ and uses zhen in both case along the same line with the basic pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth, that is, capturing the way things are (the way Heaven, the human, etc. are). For the dao pursuing is the fundamental mission of a zhen-ren, whether she is spontaneously or reﬂectively fulﬁlling this mission; and the dao pursuing is simply the Daoist version of the way-things-are capturing. One might object in this way: it is how such a person (zhen-ren) acts that deﬁnes what is zhen (that is, the notion of zhen here is a subjective-agnet-concerned existential notion of truth as a property of zhen persons in the sense that a true person is true to herself); zhen-zhi is thus predicated on zhenren. There is one serious difﬁculty with this kind of ‘metaphysical’ or existential understanding of zhen in interpreting classical Daoism. If how a true person acts and what she knows simply deﬁnes what is true, an immediate question is this: what is the (metaphysical) identity condition of such a true person by which a true person distinguishes herself from other kinds of persons? If one does not intend to mystify but demystify the identity condition of a true person, one has to admit that such an identity condition is at least logically (and arguably metaphysically) prior to how

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she does and what she knows. Isn’t such an identity condition intrinsically related to her (capacity of) capturing the dao [in more metaphorical terms, her following and ﬂoating with (or what xiao-fa means) the dao instead of the dao ﬂoating with her]? In this way, at least in the context of classical Daoism, the claimed ‘metaphysical’ notion of truth, if it is reﬂectively interesting, needs to be understood on the basis of the cross-categorical ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth; in this sense, the latter is primary while the former (if any) secondary. With the foregoing explanation, I thus intentionally translate zhen in zhen-ren into ‘true’ in the following sense to deliver one point of Zhuang Zi’s account: the bearer of the truth nature, or the subject of capturing the way things are (i.e., capturing the dao), can be and is, the human agent in a certain sense, and this kind of the truth bearer and other kinds of the truth bearer (the propositional content of belief or its linguistic expression) are about the same kind of truth property that is in accordance with our pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding truth, instead of two different kinds. The second question above is more reﬂectively interesting: is there any serious reﬂective need or any theoretic signiﬁcance in highlighting the conception of the true agent as Zhuang Zi does? My answer is yes. I think this is exactly where Zhuang Zi’s account of the true agent and true knowledge would make some signiﬁcant contribution to our understanding of the truth concern in philosophy. One crucial claim of Zhuang Zi’s account in regard to the relation between the true agent and true knowledge is this: ‘One needs to ﬁrst become a true agent [zhen-ren] and thus has one’s true knowledge [zhen-zhi]’. The point of Zhuang Zi’s claim and its signiﬁcance needs to be placed in the textual context and in view of his whole thought. The passages around the claim show that Zhuang Zi addresses some related metaphysical and epistemological issues in that context. First, metaphysically speaking, the object of knowledge is changeable; true knowledge of the object thus needs to be regarded as product of time in accordance with change of the object; but it is the human subject, instead of thought or its linguistic expression as the deﬁnite and stable result of previous knowing process, who can be directly sensitive and respond to situation and change. Second, epistemologically speaking, it indicates how to achieve knowledge at its greatness that is comprehensive and holistic (say, uniﬁed knowledge of both Heaven and the human, coordinated knowledge of various aspects of the object). It is the human subject, instead of piecemeal individual beliefs and their linguistic expressions per se, who can autonomously and creatively transcend the limitations of piecemeal individual beliefs and their linguistic expressions and unify her various individual beliefs into a holistic, comprehensive and coordinated understanding of the way things are.14 Thus she can overcome some epistemological difﬁculties that can be hardly overcome by looking at piecemeal individual beliefs and their linguistic expressions. In this sense, to this extent, and for the sake of achieving true knowledge that captures various aspects of the changing world in a holistic way, one needs to ﬁrst become a true agent who can be sensitive and respond to situation, change and complexity (or the changing, dynamic and becoming aspect of the thing as the object of knowledge). In this way, through his conception of the true agent and his account of the relation between the true agent and true knowledge, Zhuang Zi actually captures and

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highlights the pragmatic, becoming, dynamic dimension/aspect/layer of the truth concern involved in philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology. One reason that Zhuang Zi’s point is signiﬁcant is this. (1) From the point of view of philosophy of language, his point calls our attention to, or emphasize, the pragmatic dimension of the linguistic truth bearer that involves the speaker’s intention and her situated uses, instead of the semantic dimension alone. (2) From the point of view of metaphysics, his point calls our attention to, or emphasize, the becoming aspect of the object of knowledge, instead of the being aspect alone, for the sake of a holistic understanding of various correlative aspects of the way things are. (3) From the point of view of epistemology, his point calls our attention to, or emphasize, the dynamic layer, instead of the stable layer alone, of the whole process of capturing the way things are; in this way, Zhuang Zi emphasizes a holistic understanding instead of piecemeal knowledge alone.15 Through his conception of the true agent, Zhuang Zi’s view can thus enlarge and enrich the reﬂective concept of correspondence (with reality) as traditionally treated.16 One might ask: isn’t it not merely innocent but also more conceptually effective to talk about the propositional content of a belief or its linguistic expression alone as the truth bearer? Does Zhuang Zi indiscriminately render absolutely superior the order of ﬁrst becoming a true agent and then achieving true knowledge? Indeed, Zhuang Zi does not directly provide his response to such reﬂectively interesting questions in the text. Nevertheless, one can base on the point of Zhuang Zi’s general methodological strategy in treating various reﬂective issues (as given at the outset of this section) and the basic point of Daoist thought about the metaphysical dao (as characterized in the previous section) to provide a reasonable elaboration of the due implication of his general methodological strategy to the current issue. As emphasized above, the crux of Zhuang Zi’s claim needs to be placed in the textual context and his whole thought which would help us identify for which sake and for what purpose Zhuang Zi takes a certain perspective. From the foregoing discussion, one can see that Zhuang Zi intends to capture the pragmatic dimension of the belief or linguistic truth bearer, the becoming aspect of the object of true knowledge, and the dynamic layer of the process of capturing the way things are. The fact per se that one actually focuses on the becoming aspect and takes a becoming-aspect concerned perspective as one’s working perspective does not imply that one would deny other eligible perspectives as eligible. It also does not imply that one has an inadequate guiding principle that renders one’s current working perspective absolutely superior while the other eligible perspective ineligible or absolutely inferior.17 Generally speaking, Zhuang Zi is certainly not so unintelligible that he could fail to realize the being aspects of things: a thing always keeps its own certain identity at any stage of its changing process before, or unless, this thing turns into something else; changes do not happen in chaos but follow certain ways, and the dao is considered as one fundamental and unifying way throughout the universe. Speciﬁcally speaking, in the cited passages where Zhuang Zi gives his account of the true agent and true knowledge with emphasis on the pragmatic, becoming and dynamic aspect involved in the truth concern, it is arguably correct that Zhuang Zi implicitly presupposes the presence of the semantic, being and relatively-stable dimension/aspect/layer involved in

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the truth concern. Moreover, both Zhuang Zi’s own reﬂective practice and his general ‘thing-equality’ methodology are not merely compatible with, but consistently suggest, the idea that, for another sake, one needs to ﬁrst have one’s true knowledge [zhen-zhi] and thus become a true agent [zhen-ren]: given the wisdom-generating role and character-cultivating role played by one’s true knowledge (including moral knowledge as well as intellectual knowledge), one needs to ﬁrst achieve or resort to true knowledge for the sake of becoming a true agent. In so doing, one is able to have a (more) comprehensive understanding of the world and cultivate oneself in a right direction and with an adequate guidance. Zhuang Zi’s own teachings per se would help people fulﬁll this. In sum, one important implication of Zhuang Zi’s ‘thingsequality’ methodological strategy in treating the issue of the truth/dao concern is this: given that the dao-pursuing enterprise has the stable and dynamic aspects, the unchanging and changing aspects, and the being aspect and becoming aspect, they are metaphysically equal in the sense that they metaphysically depend on each other and are yin-yang complementary; the becoming-aspect-concerned perspective and the being-aspect-concerned perspective in our journey of pursuing truth/dao are methodologically equal in the sense that both are relevant, indispensable and yinyang complementary for a holistic understanding of the issue. In this way, Zhuang Zi’s contribution also lies in his general methodological insight that can be extended or applied to how to look at the relation between various dimensions, and their related projects, of the truth-concern enterprise in philosophy. My positive account of truth, to be elaborated in the last chapter, is related to my interpretative understanding of, and thus partially inspired by, Zhuang Zi’s general methodological insight. In sum, Zhuang Zi’s contribution to the truth-concern enterprise in philosophy can be dual: one is his substantial contribution to the project that is concerned with the truth-pursuing agent dimension of the truth concern; the other lies in his general methodological contribution to how to look at the relation between various dimensions of the truth concern.

5.4 From Dao-Language Deliverance of Truth Concern to Folk Language Deliverance of Pre-Theoretic Understanding of Truth
The linguistic expression of reﬂective points concerning truth pursuit in the Dao-DeJing is not isolated from, but relates to and reﬂects the general characteristics of the linguistic expression of the folk notion of truth in the Chinese linguistic community. Therefore, an examination of some characteristic features of the truth predicates or the truth-predicate-like phrases in the classical Chinese language can enhance our understanding of the philosophical concern with truth in classical Daoism, speciﬁcally speaking, and in classical Chinese philosophy, generally speaking. The reader might note that I use the plural form of ‘the truth predicate’, i.e., ‘the truth predicates’ to talk about the identity of the truth predicates in the classical Chinese language. It is true that there is no one single Chinese character in the classical Chinese that can systematically serve as the exact counterpart of, say, the English

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truth predicate ‘true’. However, there are multiple predicates or predicative phrases, which more or less perform the equivalent functions of, say, the English truth predicate. This is one prima facie complication with which my subsequent discussion begins.18 As indicated at the outset of this chapter, one reason that some think that there appears to be no concern with truth in classical Chinese philosophy is that one can hardly ﬁnd one single Chinese character in the classical Chinese language as well as in the Chinese philosophical classics that systematically serves as the exactly or even roughly synonymous counterpart of, say, the Greek or English truth predicate.19 Nevertheless, it would be quite superﬁcial to judge whether or not people in another tradition have the pre-theoretic understanding of truth through examining whether or not, in their folk linguistic expressions, they have this single systematic counterpart. Though I do not plan to conduct the detailed philological examination in this connection, one thing is certain: there were various multiple-character folk expressions in the classical or pre-modern folk Chinese that have been used to express the pretheoretic understanding of truth.20 The shared pre-theoretic idea of those various folk expressions in the classical Chinese, though appearing naive and plain, is this: )21 to pursue (seek or capture) what it (this) is (or, the way the thing is) (qiu-shi or to pursue the way things are (ze-shi ), as literally suggested by such folk : ‘to pursue/capture what this is based on the expressions as shi-shi-qiu-shi ( : ‘to pursue the way things are’).23 One can way things are’)22 or ze-qi-shi ( identify two key Chinese terms, or their cognates, that essentially appear in all those folk expressions: one is the term shi ( ) which means what this is (the way the thing is) or shi ( ) which means the way things are, and the other the term qiu ( ) or ze ( ) which means pursuing/seeking/capturing or ﬁtting.24 There is another relevant linguistic fact concerning the Chinese linguistic expressions of truth. A Chinese truth predicate and its noun/adjective cognate share the same linguistic form. For example, one can use the same Chinese multiple-character compound shi-shi-qiu-shi either as a truth predicate or as a noun (for instance, as a truth predicate in ‘What you said should shi-shi-qiu-shi; as a noun in ‘We should take shi-shi-qiu-shi as our goal in examining this matter’). In other words, when a linguistic expression of truth (and its notion) shifts grammatical status, it is supposed to maintain the same semantic content which is explicitly given jointly by the senses of the multiple characters of the compound. I will address some interesting implications of this linguistic feature of the Chinese linguistic expressions of non-linguistic truth later. In the Western folk tradition, one single term (say, ‘true’ in English) is often used to express the pre-theoretic understanding of truth. The ancient Chinese tradition instead tended to express its pre-theoretic understanding of truth in a quite straightforward way, that is, directly using a compound phrase of multiple ideographic characters that directly and explicitly gives the basic content of our25 pretheoretic understanding of truth—capturing or ﬁtting the way things are. One might speculate that, in contrast to the Western case, the ancient Chinese, both at the folk level and at the reﬂective level, were not motivated to coin one separate single term to designate one attribute whose due character had been already well delivered by

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certain ready-made phrases. One might raise a question: if, as emphasized at the outset, people in different cultural traditions or linguistic communities share roughly the same pre-theoretic understanding of truth, why didn‘t Chinese people have such a desire while the people in Western tradition did? It is indeed a reﬂectively interesting question. I think that the issue is more or less related to some characteristic differences between the two types of languages (i.e., the Western phonetic language and the Chinese ideographic language) and their related underlying mentalities, through which peoples in the two different traditions deliver their pre-theoretic understanding of truth.26 It might be the case that the one single term in the Western phonetic language that is used to stand for the pre-theoretic understanding of truth was initially created as an abbreviation of such a compound phrase like ‘capturing the way things are’ merely for the sake of convenience and economy: use just one single term with fewer phonetic letters and syllables instead of using more complicated terms. For example, a monosyllabic English truth predicate, ‘true’, or its noun counterpart, ‘truth’,27 is much more convenient and economic. And, for such convenience and economy, a phonetic language does provide its own convenient means: one could easily and conveniently make a new combination of several basic phonetic letters. As for the meaning or sense of the new term, this single term can be assigned the combination of the senses which were expressed respectively by those pre-created terms, say, ‘ﬁt’ (or ‘being in accordance with’) and ‘what are’ (or ‘the way things are’). It seems that, in this aspect, the original expressions used in the phonetic language to express the pre-theoretic understanding of truth did not enjoy any intrinsic advantage. For they themselves are merely phonetic signs with no intrinsic or inherent meaning-association in the following sense: there is no intrinsic connection between the way in which they were originally created and the characteristic features of the things for which they were created to stand. It seems that, at least partially because of this, the members of a phonetic-language community can quite freely create new terms in their written (and oral) versions of the folk language, without worrying about why, in connection with their meanings, this instead of that phonetic element was used in the new creation.28 The case of the ideographic language like Chinese is different: roughly speaking, an ideographic linguistic expression in Chinese, when created, was supposed to follow certain semantic-related principles29 without worrying about whether or not it should imitate a certain pronunciation in its folk oral counterpart. Indeed, this is one primary reason why Chinese is called an ‘ideographic’ language rather than a ‘phonetic’ language. Now, did ancient Chinese people feel the need to create a new single term to deliver their pre-theoretic understanding of truth as plainly and well expressed by such phrases as qiu-shi or ze-shi? Do the characteristic features of the Chinese ideographic language encourage such a desire? Unlike the case of the Western phonetic language, there seems no need to create a new single Chinese character for the sake of convenience and economy. Different from a typical word in the Western phonetic language which, generally speaking, is polysyllabic, one Chinese word (i.e., one Chinese character) is monosyllabic; two Chinese characters used together merely give two syllables without resulting in much inconvenience in comparison with using one Chinese character with one syllable. Furthermore, it seems

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to be semantically redundant to create a new character to signify what the other ready-made Chinese characters have already expressed well. In contrast to the case of the Western phonetic language, the original Chinese characters used to deliver the pre-theoretic understanding of truth did enjoy some advantage in the following respect. The meaning of a compound phrase of several original Chinese characters is directly and intrinsically connected with the accepted, ready-made ideographic meanings of those Chinese characters. If a new Chinese character were created and simply assigned the combined meanings of the original characters that were used to deliver the folk understanding of truth, the new character would be semantically redundant. The point here is connected with another point: it would be also semantically troublesome in the context of ideographic Chinese, which seems to be more or less nominalistically-oriented,30 if one character were created to stand for something whose merit lies merely in its apparent separate-entity status of abstractness and generality but whose folk foundation lies completely in what some other characters had already delivered well. In this way, given those semantically sensitive construction-principles in ancient times, the Chinese people seemed to be less interested in coining a new Chinese character to designate something that would go beyond and above what the multiple-character truth predicate phrases meant only for the sake of establishing separate semantic referent of abstractness and generality. In sum, it seems that, to deliver their pre-theoretic understanding of truth, ancient Chinese people were not motivated and had less desire to create one new single Chinese character that was to be systematically substituted for some already-well-circulated multiple-character-compound truth predicate(s) either for the sake of convenience and economy or for the sake of semantic necessity. One might ask a further question: why does there exist one single, systematically used Chinese truth predicate zhen ( ) in modern Chinese as a rough counterpart of the English term ‘true’ while there did not exist such usage in ancient Chinese, though, as discussed before, zhen did already appear in some classical texts? There are two notes. First, it seems that the modern systematic usage of the Chinese truth predicate zhen has resulted primarily from its serving as the translation of the truth predicate in the Western phonetic language roughly in the modern time. Second, as discussed in the previous two sections, the Chinese character zhen already appeared in the classical Daoist texts, the Dao-De-Jing and the Zhuang Zi, and was used essentially along the line of the pre-theoretic understanding of truth to the effect that the truth bearer captures the way things are; nevertheless, it was not used as extensively and systematically as it is today. Clearly, it was not used as a systematic counterpart in the classical Chinese language of the truth predicate in the Western phonetic language. At this point, one philosophically interesting and signiﬁcant question is this: how does the foregoing characteristic difference between the linguistic truth predicates in the ancient Chinese ideographic language and the Western phonetic language bear upon the folk concerns with truth in the different folk traditions and upon the reﬂective concerns with truth in the different philosophical traditions? Raising this question certainly does not presuppose linguistic determinism in this connection: one can see from the preceding examination that the addressed

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distinction is connected at least partially with the distinctive collective mentalities that respectively underlie the two types of linguistic communities. The point of the question is to explore in which aspect, and to what extent, the distinct situations of the truth predicates in the ancient Chinese ideographic language and the Western phonetic language have contributed to distinct manifestations and focuses of the philosophical concern with truth. Let us look ﬁrst at how this bears on the folk language deliverance of the prephilosophical understanding of truth. Indeed, one quite straightforward consequence of the foregoing situation at the folk level seems to be this. In the folk discourse of the Western tradition, there seems to be the need to further explain the semanticascent version of the folk notion of truth, which has been associated with the oneterm truth predicate, by virtue of some explanatory paraphrases like real-life (T) sentences. In contrast, in the ancient Chinese folk discourse, one could hardly ﬁnd the ancient Chinese counterpart of such explanatory paraphrases; for there seems no such need. The meaning of a Chinese multiple-character compound truth predicate (ﬁtting or capturing what is or what really is) is explicit and clear enough to deliver the pre-theoretic understanding of truth. People in the ancient Chinese linguistic community had no difﬁculty and thus no need to further explain ‘capturing what it is’ or its multiple-character cognates in ancient Chinese. In contrast, although the counterparts in ancient Chinese of real-life (T) sentences seemed to be semantically redundant, it seems that real-life (T) sentences do play an imperceptible but indispensable role in rectifying or regulating ordinary people’s pre-theoretic understanding of truth in the phonetic linguistic community with the one-term truth predicate being systematically used. As a result, although there exists a characteristic difference in the folk expression between the two distinct linguistic communities and folk traditions, one thing is still common: peoples in both folk or linguistic traditions do not confuse themselves in regard to the basic point of the pre-theoretic understanding of truth; truth (of a truth bearer) lies in its capturing, pursuing or corresponding to what it is or the way things are. Now let us move onto a more reﬂectively interesting question: how does the characteristic difference between the truth predicates in the ancient Chinese ideographic language and the Western phonetic language bear upon the reﬂective concern with truth in the different philosophical traditions? The prima facie matter of fact is this: although the characteristic difference in the folk expression of the pre-theoretic understanding of truth between the two linguistic communities and folk traditions does not result in much difference in the pre-theoretic understanding of truth between the Chinese and Western traditions at the folk level, it did bear upon the difference between the philosophical traditions in view of their reﬂective approaches. In the Western tradition, while the folk notion of truth, as explained before, is widely considered to be rectiﬁed and regulated by such explanatory paraphrases as real-life (T) sentences, the reﬂective concept of truth, generally speaking, is not supposed by some philosophers to be necessarily connected with real-life (T) sentences or with our pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are-capturing’ understanding of truth. It is known that there are various competing approaches to the issue of what truth is (or,

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in terminology as speciﬁed in Chapter 1, the constitutional-characterization project concerning the nature of truth), and the correspondence approach is only one of them, though it is a primary one in the history of Western philosophy. One might speculate that the folk fact that the notion of truth is singled out systematically by one term would encourage the tendency of taking the notion to stand for something that stands on its own above and beyond merely capturing the way things are or corresponding to what it is. Though it seems that such a tendency has been balanced out at the folk level by a natural or pre-theoretical connection between the folk notion of truth and real-life (T) sentences, some philosophers in the Western tradition did not tend to render such a connection philosophically endorsable. Rather, the single term ‘true’ has been taken by some as one primary term that needs to be theoretically redeﬁned instead of being philosophically unproblematic, though it enjoys its widely accepted default understanding in its folk usage, and though it has its standard dictionary sense. This situation seems to contribute to some characteristic orientations and styles of the philosophical concern with truth in Western philosophy (prominently, some philosophers’ revisionist attitude towards people’s pre-theoretic understanding of truth). Given that there is something, truth, singled out by one single term and that philosophy is traditionally expected to pursue some general truths concerning the world and ourselves, historically, Western philosophers have consciously endeavored to explicitly and directly explore various truth-or-‘true’-related questions in meta-discourse (such as ‘What is truth?’ or, recently, ‘What is the function of the truth predicate?’). This has resulted in various theoretical accounts of truth. Thus the meta-philosophical concern with what truth is, generally speaking, has presented itself in such a manifest way. Although there has been a long nonrevisionist tradition towards the pre-philosophical understanding of truth, which has been highlighted by the correspondence theory traditionally and deﬂationary theory recently, the modern version of the non-revisionist approach results largely from such a manifest endeavor in meta-discourse to explicitly and systematically investigate the question ‘What is truth?’. For this reason, I call ‘the manifest approach’ the approach taken by those who have held a non-revisionist methodological attitude in Western philosophy. In contrast to the manifest approach as a general trend in the Western philosophical tradition, the philosophers in traditional Chinese philosophy tended to take a recessive approach in the meta-philosophical concern with what truth is in the following way. Indeed, inﬂuenced by the terminology and ready-made approaches available in Western philosophy, one tends to focus on whether or not, in another philosophical tradition, there were those representative questions that are typically presented in Western philosophy, such as ‘What is truth?’ and, recently, ‘What is the function of the truth predicate?’ in the meta-philosophical concern with truth. Nevertheless, traditional Chinese philosophers seldom endeavored to explicitly, directly, and systematically answer those questions. However, this amounts neither to their lack of the second-level philosophical concern with truth nor to their lack of the ﬁrst-level philosophical concern with truth. What is crucial is to realize what constitutes the philosophical concern with truth in traditional Chinese philosophy. To answer that question, one needs to look at how people in ancient China presented

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their pre-theoretic understanding of truth and how traditional Chinese philosophers presented their reﬂective understanding of truth. In the ﬁrst half of this section, in contrast to the situation in the Western tradition, I have explained how people in ancient China typically presented their folk understanding of truth: for several reasons, they tended to use a multiple-character-compound truth predicate to explicitly and directly deliver their ‘what-it-is capturing’ or ‘what-things-are-capturing’ understanding of truth rather than using one single character. In this way, there seemed no need to use some explanatory paraphrase like a list of real-life (T) sentences as a meaning-reminder of the truth predicate, because a Chinese multiplecharacter-compound truth predicate had already plainly delivered the pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth. With this characteristic feature, what the Chinese folk notion of truth and their language expressions presented to traditional Chinese philosophers was not a notion about a seemingly separate property of truth that was singled out by one single term but a straightforward folk notion of truth (capturing the way things are). In this case, what traditional Chinese philosophers faced was also quite straightforward in connection with their philosophical concern with truth: to adopt the straightforward folk notion of truth or to reject it. For a number of good reasons (with which many of us should be familiar in explaining why we endorse our pre-theoretic understanding of truth in our philosophical inquiries), traditional Chinese philosophers took the former alternative— a non-revisionist methodological attitude towards the content of the pre-theoretic understanding of truth; they introduced neither a separate concept that was supposed to go above and beyond capturing the way things are nor one single term to systematically identify such a concept. In this way, it is arguably right to say that following or pursuing the dao (qiu-dao ) is one representative reﬂective echo or philosophical elaboration of the pretheoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth in philosophical Daoism, speciﬁcally speaking, and in classical Chinese philosophy, generally speaking. This is on the track of a non-revisionist methodological attitude as speciﬁed before. As a result, the classical Daoist philosophers and, more generally speaking, classical Chinese philosophers were not motivated to explicitly answer such questions in their meta-discourse as ‘What is the dao pursuing?’/‘What is truth?’ in general terms. They rendered self-evident the basic point of the pre-theoretic understanding of truth; but they did not simply take it for granted without their reﬂective consideration. They reﬂectively but recessively transformed the pre-theoretic understanding of truth, i.e., the folk notion of capturing the way things are, into a philosophical concept of the dao pursuing or the dao following. Indeed, one reﬂective sophistication of the philosophical concern with truth in classical Chinese philosophy is its transformation of the folk notion of reality into a quasi-philosophical concept of dao, which is often translated into ‘way’ in English. It is known that the concept of dao is one of the most fundamental concepts throughout classical Chinese philosophy as well as philosophical Daoism. It is limited neither to the Chinese classic, the Dao-De-Jing, nor to philosophical Daoism. Actually, almost every major movement of thought in classical Chinese philosophy talked about the dao in its own way and took its dao pursuing as its ultimate concern, although philosophical Daoism alone

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is known by that name partially because the dao-teachings of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi were so impressive and inﬂuential during that time. Now an interesting question is whether or not the notion of dao introduces some doubtful theoretical or ontological entity. Note that, ﬁrst, the term dao is not a theoretic terminology or philosophical coinage but one of the most ordinary Chinese characters that was widely circulated in the folk discourse—one of its primary meanings is way. Second, the notion represented by the Chinese character dao is a folk notion that had appeared in the folk discourse well before it appeared in the Dao-De-Jing. To this extent, the dao-pursuing version of the philosophical concern with truth in classical Chinese philosophy reveals itself as a non-revisionist approach to the folk explanatory resources regarding truth. Indeed, why a recessive approach is taken in classical Chinese philosophy is related not only to the foregoing characteristics of the Chinese folk notion of truth and its language expressions but also with a general situation-concerned orientation that discourages giving a general universal-capturing deﬁnition of pursuing dao. In this aspect, one can ﬁnd a contrasting difference between the Socrates-style universal-capturing deﬁnitional approach31 in the Western tradition and a situationconcerned approach in the Chinese tradition.32 Consider the concept of piety. It is known that Confucian ethics is concerned with (ﬁlial) piety, but in contrast to Socrates’ approach, it never intended to give a general deﬁnition or answer the question ‘What is piety?’ in general terms. By the same token, the classical Chinese philosophers were greatly concerned with pursuing the dao, but, in contrast to a representative approach in the Western tradition, they did not intend to give a general universal-capturing deﬁnition of pursuing the dao or answer the question ‘What is the dao pursuing?’ in general terms. In this way, the non-revisionist methodological attitude in classical Chinese philosophy might as well be called a ‘recessive non-revisionist approach’.

5.5 How the Cross-Tradition Examination Can Enhance Understanding
In this section, based on the foregoing discussion, and in view of the previous case analyses, I intend to highlight several connections in which the relevant insights and treatments in classical Daoism under this cross-tradition examination can enhance our understanding of the philosophical concern with truth. The points to be highlighted are either already addressed in the above discussion or have yet to be explicitly elaborated. 1. As far as the metaphysical dimension of the philosophical concern with truth in regard to non-linguistic truth is concerned, the classical Daoist ‘dao-concern’ approach has made some reﬂectively interesting contributions that I render significant for our contemporary exploration of the nature and status of non-linguistic truth. Among others, here I plan to highlight four connections in which the classical Daoist ‘dao-concern’ approach can contribute to our understanding of the metaphysical dimension of the philosophical concern with truth. Three of them

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have been already addressed explicitly in the proceeding discussion and thus brieﬂy highlighted below, while the fourth one has yet to be explicitly explained before and thus will be elaborated a bit more. First, the philosophical concern with truth, as explained in the previous section, does not necessarily present itself in one single fashion, i.e., the manifest approach that explicitly and directly concerns itself with a series questions in the meta-discourse such as ‘What is truth?’ and ‘What is the raison d’être of the truth predicate in our language?’. Rather, the philosophical concern with truth can present itself in distinct ways in different philosophical traditions, which are sensitive to their distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds and related to underlying collective mentalities (if any). It would be quite superﬁcial, and thus would miss the point, to characterize the identity of the philosophical concern with truth exclusively in virtue of whether it takes the same manifest fashion and whether one can ﬁnd a predicate that would be exactly the same counterpart of the truth predicate in, say, English. In this way, the philosophical concern with truth in classical Daoism as presented in the Dao-De-Jing and the Zhuang-Zi both illustrates and illuminates one representative case. The current case analysis explains how the philosophical concern with truth in classical Daoism presents itself in a recessive way. This situation is related to a general Chinese cultural and linguistic background around that time as well as some characteristic ‘recessive’ features of classical Daoism’s own teachings. In the previous section, I give an analysis of how some distinctive features of the linguistic expressions of truth in the Chinese ideographical language and the Western phonetic language like English bear on the ways in which the philosophical concern with truth presents itself respectively in the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. Second, what has made the case of the philosophical concern with truth in classical Daoism philosophically interesting does not lie merely in its role as an illuminating case of how such signiﬁcant concern in philosophy can present itself in distinct ways but in its treatment of the metaphysical dimension of the philosophical concern with truth. Its ‘recessive’ treatment of the issue of truth status is philosophically interesting. As explained in Section 1.2, two major questions concerning the issue of truth status in the metaphysical project of the philosophical concern with truth are these: (1) ‘Which fundamental methodological attitude towards our pre-theoretic understanding of truth needs to be adopted, a non-revisionist one or a revisionist one?’ and (2) ‘Is truth substantive or deﬂationary?’ Classical Daoism makes its characteristic ‘recessive’ approach to the two questions in the following ways. (1) Classical Daoism clearly takes its non-revisionist approach in this manner: it reﬂectively elaborates the pre-theoretic understanding of truth (as capturing the way things are) into the axiom-like notion of dao-pursuing; this is both for the sake of its substantive content to identify the fundamental mission of reﬂective inquiries of Daoism and for the sake of its substantive explanatory role. (2) In so doing, classical Daoism also ﬁrmly takes a substantivist position: classical Daoism’s notion of dao-pursuing as a reﬂective elaboration of the pre-theoretic understanding of truth is substantive both because the dao pursuit substantively identiﬁes the fundamental mission and nature of philosophical inquiries from the Daoist point of view and because the dao pursuit plays a substantive explanatory role in identifying a normative goal

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of philosophical inquiries. So, in the classical Daoist recessive approach, the two questions become the two sides of one coin that mutually resort to each other and are intrinsically related. Putting the involved substantial point of views aside, one can see that what makes the Daoist approach philosophically interesting in view of methodological strategy is its ‘recessive’ character. It does not directly argue for the adequacy of its approach in the meta-discourse; rather, it ‘silently’ reveals its positions concerning the two questions by showing how the result of such positions effectively function and has its explanatory force in its own reﬂective practice. It is noted that the above characterization of the classical Daoist approach to the issue of truth status is a philosophical interpretation of how a Daoist thinker would respond on the basis of those conceptual and explanatory resources as given in the Dao-De-Jing and the Zhuang Zi, instead of a purely historical description. Third, to the extent as explained in Section 5.3, Zhuang Zi’s notion of the true agent is a signiﬁcant contribution to the issue of truth bearers in regard to the metaphysical dimension of the philosophical concern with truth. I do not plan to repeat what has been already explained before in this connection but highlight one point that is related to the next connection in which the classical Daoist contributes to our understanding and treatment of the metaphysical dimension of the philosophical concern with truth: i.e., the truth-agent account is intended to capture the holistic aspect of non-linguistic truth in the way explained in Section 5.3. Fourth, the classical Daoist approach to the issue of truth bearers prompts us to think about another related issue: how to adequately formulate our axiom-like pre-theoretic ‘the way-things-are capturing’ understanding of non-linguistic truth. Typically, in the Western philosophical tradition, such an axiom-like pre-theoretic understanding of truth is characterized in a ‘piecemeal’ way that takes the truth bearer exclusively as the individual piecemeal sentence or proposition or belief. Consider some most recent formulations in this fashion. William Alston presents the following formulation as the core thesis of his alethic realism:
A statement (proposition, belief . . .) is true if and only if what the statement says to be the case actually is the case.33

Susan Haack presents the follow formulations as the core principle concerning truth:
[A] proposition is true just in case it is the proposition that p, and p . . .34

I call such a formulation a ‘piecemeal formulation’. If such a piecemeal way is viewed as the most basic, exclusive way of formulating our basic pre-theoretic understanding of truth, one difﬁculty with it is this: it cannot capture the holistic aspect of non-linguistic truth as captured by our pre-theoretic understanding of truth. (Surely, as explained in Section 2.1, when such a formulation is suggested as one perspective elaboration of our basic pre-theoretic understanding of truth in view of a certain purpose and focus, it is desirable and needed.) Given that a Zhuang-Zi-style Daoist notion of truth bearers is open to various truth-bearer candidates, and given that the core identity of dao is the way things are, a formulation of our most basic pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth that both straight

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forwardly delivers its ‘way-things-are capturing’ point and well reﬂects the Daoist relevant point is this:
The nature of truth (of the truth bearer) consists in (the truth bearer’s) capturing the way things are.

This formulation allows various identities of truth bearers: it is compatible with either a piecemeal elaboration or a holistic elaboration. The reader can see that this formulation is actually the formulation (AT), which is proposed to deliver our basic pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth at the outset of Section 2.1.1 when I analyze Tarski’s strategy. Indeed, such a formulation provides a due elaboration basis in view of other connections than that of truth-bearer identity, a point that I will further explain and illustrate in Section 6.1 where the account of non-linguistic truth in substantive-perspectivist theory is elaborated. 2. As far as the linguistic dimension of the philosophical concern with truth in regard to the linguistic truth predicate is concerned, the foregoing examination in this chapter can reinforce and well illustrate one conclusion that has been arrived at in Chapter 3 concerning the linguistic truth predicate used in the phonetic language community: the raison d’être of the linguistic expression of truth and its notion in our language practice lies primarily in its semantic function instead of its logicosyntactic function (if any). Before explaining this, let me ﬁrst brieﬂy review the due background in this connection and the relevant issue raised at the end of Chapter 3. In Chapter 3, via analyzing Quine’s disquotational approach and its deﬂationist development, I examine one popular way of carrying out the ‘semantic-ascent’ approach in treating the philosophical issue of truth especially among some philosophers who advocate deﬂationism in contemporary philosophy, i.e., a strategy of focusing on examining the raison d’être of the linguistic truth predicate in relevant linguistic contexts like an epistemico-pragmatic context as represented in the equivalence thesis (M). The strategy seems effective when one has a due understanding of what counts as relevant linguistic contexts. Indeed, if the raison d’être of the linguistic expression of something in our language practice is really unavailable, one would have a strong reason to disregard the thing as something reﬂectively worthy or philosophically interesting and signiﬁcant. At the end of Chapter 3 when drawing several morals from the mistreatment by some representative deﬂationism advocates, I raise the concern about the limitation of the aforementioned deﬂationist strategy. As I emphatically indicate there, an application of this raison-d’être-focus strategy can become problematic if it focuses exclusively on the raison d’être of the linguistic truth predicate in an epistemico-pragmatic context like that of (M), while ignoring or dismissing the raison d’être of signiﬁcant linguistic expressions of nonlinguistic truth and its notion in other kinds of linguistic contexts than those (M)-like contexts. For this treatment unjustiﬁably dismisses or reduces the raison d’être of the linguistic expression of non-linguistic truth and (of its notion) in our language to the raison d’être of the linguistic truth predicate in a pragmatic context of language use. In so doing, this treatment actually limits the due scope of relevant language practice, in which one can examine the raison d’être of the linguistic expression of non-linguistic truth (and of its notion), merely to the way of how to use the linguistic

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truth predicate in an epistemico-pragmatic context like that of (M). In other words, the local character of the deﬂationist ‘linguistic’ argument results from the following facts. (1) The linguistic contexts under its consideration are actually limited only to some of the ‘ﬁrst-order’ contexts, i.e., the kind of folk epistemico-pragmatic contexts as highlighted by (M), in which one makes one’s assertion either by assigning the truth predicate to an individual sentence or simply by uttering the sentence with assertoric force. (2) The linguistic contexts under its consideration include neither the reﬂective ‘second-order’ ones, in which the truth predicate and/or its cognates are used to reﬂectively talk about our basic pre-theoretic understanding of truth in its reﬂective elaborations, nor such ‘ﬁrst-order’ contexts as the non-epistemic semantic ones which are given in the forms like (RLT1) and (RLT2) in natural language and reﬂectively presented by (T) in a more formal language. Now the foregoing examination in this chapter of some relevant situations of how the Chinese linguistic expressions of non-linguistic truth have been used in the classical Daoist reﬂective context and in the folk context of the classical Chinese practice has shown the following. (1) In those folk linguistic contexts (either the ﬁrst-order predicative contexts in which a truth predicate is used to assign the truth attribute to a truth bearer or the second-order contexts in which a noun cognate of a truth predicate is used to refer to, or talk about, truth), the Chinese linguistic expressions of truth, either in their predicate form and in their noun-cognate form, primarily play their semantic function to deliver some substantial meaning that is clearly in accordance with our basic pre-theoretic understanding of non-linguistic truth. As far as the ﬁrst-order folk contexts are concerned, besides those epistemicopragmatic ﬁrst-order contexts in which the truth predicate in contemporary Chinese as the Chinese counterpart of the truth predicate (say, in English) plays its logicosyntactic role as well as its semantic role, there are many non-assertoric ﬁrst-order linguistic contexts (e.g., the sentence ‘What you tell should shi-shi-qiu-shi [capture what this is based on the way the thing is]’) in which a truth predicate is simply indispensable; this is clearly not merely for the sake of its logico-syntactic function, but primarily for the sake of its semantic function to indicate the truth attribute which consists in capturing the way things. (2) In such reﬂective linguistic contexts as those of the Dao-De-Jing and of the Zhuang-Zi, the Chinese linguistic expression of truth (such as zhen) possesses the meaning that is fundamentally in accordance with our basic pre-theoretic understanding of non-linguistic truth (capturing the way things are). Clearly, it primarily plays its semantic function to indicate the truth attribute as reaching or capturing the way things are, instead of their syntactic function (if any). More concretely speaking, in the ﬁrst-order reﬂective context in the Dao-De-Jing, as explained before, zhen is used as a truth predicate to assign the truth attribute, though the Chinese character had yet to be used as a systematically-used truth predicate around that time; in the second-order reﬂective contexts like that of the Zhuang-Zi, zhen is used to refer to or talk about the truth attribute that is possessed by true knowledge and the true agent in the way as explained before. What makes the addressed Chinese cases reﬂectively interesting and signiﬁcantly relevant lies in the following two linguistic facts together with their underlying

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mentalities. (1) A Chinese truth predicate in classical Chinese is not one single character that systematically serves as the counterpart of the truth predicate in a phonetic language like English. Rather, it is typically a multiple-character-compound truth predicate; its substantial linguistic sense consists in capturing the pre-theoretic understanding of truth and is explicitly given jointly by the senses of those component characters in the multiple-character compound together with their combination rules. (2) Generally speaking, a Chinese truth predicate and its noun/adjective cognate share the same linguistic form. For example, as cited before, one can use the same Chinese multiple-character compound shi-shi-qiu-shi either as a truth predicate or as a noun (for instance, as a truth predicate in ‘What you tell [or you] should shi-shi-qiu-shi [capture what this is based on the way the thing is]’; as a noun in ‘We should take shi-shi-qiu-shi as our goal in examining this matter’). This linguistic fact shows that, when the same one linguistic expression of truth and its notion shift grammatical statuses, it is to maintain the same semantic content that is explicitly given jointly by the senses of each of the multiple characters of the compound. In this way, one simply cannot dismiss those second-order reﬂective linguistic contexts as corrupt ones in which what is expressed by a noun cognate of a truth predicate is considered to be metaphysically loaded (say, an abstract entity that is supposed to be beyond particular things that have particular truth attributes). 3. As far as the explanatory-role dimension of the philosophical concern with truth in regard to the understood substantive notion of truth is concerned, the relevant insights and treatments of classical Daoism has suggested that there is another important connection in which the substantive notion of truth, as captured by our pre-theoretic understanding of truth, can play its indispensable explanatory role and which has been either implicitly denied (by the aforementioned NTCP thesis and NTCP thesis∗ and by the core idea of deﬂationism as characterized in Section 1.3) or has yet to be paid due attention. This important connection can be viewed as another signiﬁcant perspective elaboration of the comprehensive thesis of truth centrality concerning its explanatory role, i.e., the TCRE thesis: (TCER) Truth (or the concept of truth) plays its indispensable, central explanatory role in philosophical inquiries, as examined in the previous chapter where I discuss its two perspective-elaboration sub-theses, i.e., the thesis of truth as a (strategic) normative goal (the TNG thesis) and the thesis of truth as an explanatory basis (the TEB thesis). The currently highlighted explanatory role played by the substantive notion of truth consists in its effectively serving as one important cross-tradition-understanding basis in view of one central common concern, i.e., the philosophical concern with truth, of philosophical inquiries of different traditions. This point can be highlighted by a thesis of truth as cross-tradition understanding basis, the TCTB thesis, which can be formulated as follows: (TCTB) The substantive notion of truth, as characterized by our pre-theoretic understanding of truth, is an explanatory basis of cross-tradition understanding of one central common concern (i.e., to capture the way things are) of philosophical inquiries of different traditions.

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As a matter of fact, the TCTB thesis is already implied partially by the two versions of the TNG thesis, i.e., its semantic-ascent version (TNG∗ ) and (TNG∗∗∗ ) as a reﬂective way of presenting its explanatory-reduction version (TNG∗∗ ). But notice that the TCRB thesis has yet to be completely established through the current crosstradition examination of the case of classical Daoism alone, as this cross-tradition examination is not pretended to exhaustively cover all the cases in various different philosophical traditions. That is one reason why I use the term ‘partially’ in the previous passage. Nevertheless, it is arguably right that the case of classical Daoism under the current cross-tradition examination does present a strong case for the TCRB thesis. 4. The cross-tradition examination has one implication to the validity of deﬂationism. Insofar as deﬂationism is suggested as one general account that is not limited to the local situation of the philosophical concern with truth in the Western tradition, deﬂationism has more substantial work to be done for the sake of eventually establishing the generality of its central thesis. Deﬂationism needs to have a cross-tradition examination of situations of at least some other major philosophical traditions in which the philosophical concern with truth is also a major concern. For example, as far as the linguistic dimension of the philosophical concern with truth is concerned, the cross-examination in this connection also raises some serious challenge to deﬂationism. Given that there are similar pre-theoretic and reﬂective understandings of non-linguistic truth both in the Western tradition and in a non-Western tradition like the Chinese one, and given that the common pre-theoretic understanding of non-linguistic truth and its reﬂective understanding have been linguistically expressed in some distinctive ways respectively in a phonetic language like English and in an ideographic language like (classical) Chinese (both in the ‘ﬁrst-order’ folk context and in the ‘second-order’ reﬂective context), a linguistic observation limited to the former case is clearly not a complete one. To render their deﬂationist conclusion global, deﬂationism needs to have a cross-tradition examination of how our pre-theoretic and reﬂective understandings of non-linguistic truth have been presented in distinctive philosophical traditions via their distinctive linguistic means.

Notes
1. A. C. Graham said, the crucial question for those traditional Chinese philosophers ‘is not the Western philosopher’s “What is the truth?” but “Where is the Way?”, . . .’ (Graham, 1989, p. 3). To elaborate Graham’s point, David Hall and Roger Ames continued, ‘The Western “What” question is usually expressed in something like this manner: “What kinds of things are there?” “What is the world made of?” or simply, “What is this?” Such questions have resulted in a catalog of facts and principles that assist one in taking an inventory of the world about us. The Chinese “Where” question, on the other hand, led to a search for the right path, the appropriate models of conduct to lead one along the path, the “way” that life is to be lived, and where to stand. . .. In the West, truth is a knowledge of what is real and what represents that reality. For the Chinese, knowledge is not abstract, but concrete; it is not representational, but performative and participatory; it is not discursive, but is, as a knowledge of the way, a kind of know-how’ (Hall and Ames, 1998, pp. 103–104).

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2. The phrase ‘traditional Chinese philosophy’ or ‘classical Chinese philosophy’ is used to cover various movements of philosophical thought in China from its pre-Han period (roughly from the eleventh century to 206 BCE) through early Qing Dynasty (1616–1839). 3. Cf., Chad Hansen (1985, pp. 491–519), and Hansen (2003, pp. 205–224). 4. Cf., David Hall (1997, 2001). 5. Cf., Huston Smith (1980). Huston Smith discusses the idea of triple truth, i.e., truth as a property of things, truth as a property of persons and truth as a property of statements. He identiﬁes the three dominant truth concerns in the three major civilizations in this way: ‘India tied truth to things, East Asia [China and Japan] to persons, and the West to statements’ (1980, p. 427). 6. This position is given by Chenyang Li in his email correspondence with the author on the issue. The citations are from the email correspondence. Li seems to share with Smith the same idea of multiple truth, but locates truth-as-what really is in a bit different ways. Smith distinguishes the ontological notion of truth as a property of things from the existential notion of truth as a property of persons and attributes the former to India and the latter to China, while Li seems to merge what Smith calls ‘the ontological notion of truth’ and ‘the existential notion of truth’ into one notion, the ‘metaphysical’ notion of truth as ‘existence with the highest value and ultimate meaning’, and attributes its concern to China as well as India. One textual evidence that Li cites to support this ‘metaphysical’ understanding of truth is the usage of the Chinese character ‘zhen’ ( ), which is the counterpart in contemporary Chinese of ‘true’ in English, in the Dao-De-Jing and the Zhuang-Zi. Part of his strategy line seems to be this: given that the notion of truth under examination is what ‘zhen’ is used to express in the classical Daoist texts, he starts with examine what ‘zhen’ is used to express and then identiﬁes the notion of truth. In contrast, my strategy line is different: I start with, and focus primarily on, examining whether or not, and how, the common pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth (or such a fundamental concern with the ‘capturing-and-making-true’ dual-directional relation between the subjective and the objective) is prominently presented in the reﬂective context of the Dao-De-Jing and the Zhuang-Zi, no matter how the term ‘zhen’ is used in them (for the former is independent of the latter); then, or secondarily, I examine the usage of ‘zhen’ in the two classical Daoist texts. In this way, even if ‘zhen’ means something else than capturing the way things are, that would not substantially affect the result of the primary examination. But, based on my subsequent examination, I will explain why the usage of ‘zhen’ in the two classical Daoist texts is actually in line more with what the pre-theoretic ‘way-things-are capturing’ understanding of truth than with the aforementioned ‘metaphysical’ understanding. 7. For a detailed examination of this point, see Mou (2003). 8. This is a point that is explicitly made by Zhuang Zi in Inner Chapter 2 ‘Qi-Wu-Lun’ [On Equality of Things] of the Zhuang-Zi. 9. This interpretation is to be taken as textual evidence for the view to the effect that the notion of truth in the Dao-De-Jing is a purely ‘metaphysical’ one. See Endnote 6 above. 10. For a detailed examination of the nature of the Zhuang Zi style perspectivism, see Mou (2008). 11. The two points are suggested in the following passage (my translation) in the Zhuang-Zi: Everything has its that aspect (bi : what that is/being that) and its this aspect (shi : what this is/being this). One cannot see the this aspect of one thing if one looks at the thing from the perspective of the that aspect; one can see the this aspect if one looks at the thing from the perspective of the this aspect. One thus can say that the that and the this come from each other. . . Thus, the sage does not limited to looking merely at the this or that aspect [from the ﬁnite point of view] but looks at all the aspects of the thing in the light of Nature. The this is also the that, and the that is also the this. The that has one criterion of one criterion of what this is versus what this is not [right/adequate versus wrong/inadequate] (shi-fei ), while the this has one criterion of what this is versus what this is not [right/adequate versus wrong/inadequate]. Is there really a

156

5 Case Analysis IV distinction between the that and the this?. . . When the this aspect and the that aspect cease to be viewed as opposite, it is called ’the pivot of taking Dao point of view’. One’s capturing the pivot is like one’s standing the center around which all things revolve in endless change: one thus can deal with endless change from the Dao point of view, among whose many manifestations the this and the that are. Therefore it is said that the best way is to look at things in the light [of Nature].—Inner Chapter 2 “Qi-Wu-Lun” ( ) [On Equality of Things] (my emphases.) In contrast to some interpretations that take this passage as crucial textual evidence for Zhuang Zi’s alleged radical ‘anything goes’ relativism or a relativistic perspectivism, I think Zhuang Zi’s point here is essentially a kind of objective perspectivism. For, instead of ‘any perspective goes’, Zhuang Zi bases relevance and eligibility of a perspective (given an object of study) on whether it points to some aspect that is really or objectively possessed by the object of study. In the last chapter, when identifying and characterizing a meta-philosophical methodological framework that guides my own positive account of truth (substantive perspectivism), I will say more about such a kind of objective perspectivism, some of whose crucial ideas I think have been already suggested by the Zhuang Zi style perspectivism. Excerpts from Inner Chapter 6 “Da-Zong-Shi” of the Zhuang-Zi, translated by this author. At this point, the reader can see how the true agent under this interpretation of Zhuang Zi is signiﬁcantly different from the true person under Smith’s interpretation if he extends his notion of truth as a property of persons (Smith, 1980) to Zhuang Zi’s case: in the former case, the true agent is true to the way things are (the dao); while in the latter case, the true person is ‘true to oneself’ (Smith, 1980, p. 426). One can further evaluate the need of the conception of the truth agent in view of such reﬂectively interesting questions as these: (1) whether or not there is something as a whole that is beyond what piecemeal individual beliefs or statements can tell but that can be captured by the human agent; (2) whether or not there are things that at least currently cannot be descriptively captured by any particular predication expressions but that can be understood and captured by the human agent and only generally covered by ‘the way the things are’. In his recent book, Kvanvig emphasizes the value of (more complete) understanding that is achieved in a holistic way in contrast to knowledge that can be piecemeal (cf., Kvanvig, 2003, Chapter 8). Kvanvig’s point is kindred in spirit with that of Zhuang Zi’s account of truth-pursuing agent in this connection. Zhuang Zi’s conception of the true agent, as interpreted here, seems to be related to virtue epistemology in contemporary philosophy, as Chenyang Li points out to me. I agree. Considering this essay is primarily concerned with relevant issues in the philosophy of language and metaphysics, I do not further elaborate the relevant points of Zhuang Zi’s conception of the true agent to virtue epistemology here. Interested readers can see L. Code (1987), where some major points of her version of virtue epistemology are kindred in spirit with Zhuang Zi’s. For a detailed discussion of this methodological point, see Mou (2001c), especially its Part 3, pp. 351–356. There is one methodological note. Considering the composition and primary concern of the expected readership of this book and their concerns here (i.e., primarily, the non-native Chinese speaker with relevant philosophical concerns), in the following discussion, I will neither depend on some controversial philosophical/linguistic ‘evidence’ in the classical Chinese texts nor go into some detailed philological examination of the Chinese narrative. Rather, I focus on some uncontroversial linguistic evidence or some standard elaboration of certain known linguistic facts. Especially, at least for the sake of argument, I take for granted certain linguistic phenomena from which some authors draw different conclusions. In contrast, in modern Chinese, there is one single, uniﬁed Chinese character, ‘zhen’ ( ), that serves as the counterpart of the English truth predicate ‘true’.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

Notes

157

20. Heiner Roetz has given an interesting examination of some of the validity terms and concepts and validity criteria in Zhou texts (actually in some selected pre-Han philosophical texts). Cf., Roetz (1993). 21. It is known that the Chinese character ‘shi’ ( ) was used in two ways before the Han dynasty. The ﬁrst use of ‘shi’, the primary one, is its nominal use as a demonstrative pronoun, ‘this’/ ‘what is this’, in contrast to another demonstrative pronoun, ‘bi’ ( ‘that’). The second use of ‘shi’ is its predicative use as ‘being this ﬁtting what it (this) is’, in contrast to another term ‘fei’ ( ‘being not this not ﬁtting what it is not’). The subject of the predicative use of ‘shi’ is often something linguistic or what is said ( ‘yan’). A good illustration of the connection between the two uses is a well-known passage in Chapter 2, ‘Qi-Wu-Lun’, of the Zhuang-Zi that gives the basic point of Zhuang Zi’s general methodological strategy, which I cite in Endnote 8 of this chapter. It is also a good context in which one can ﬁnd that the second meaning of ‘shi’ is not limited to ﬁtting (normative) rightness in moral sense, as many of its English translations paraphrase it; rather, it also points to ﬁtting what it is in a more comprehensive metaphysical sense, though in modern Chinese ‘shi’ and ‘fei’ means primarily ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the moral sense. It is usually thought that, before the Six Dynasties (around 5th century), ‘shi’ was not used as copula. 22. This is a four-character predicative proverb in classical Chinese which, like many other fourcharacter predicative proverbs in classical Chinese, is still widely circulated even in the modern Chinese linguistic community. For one of its ancient uses, see in Chapter “He-Jian-Xian-Wang-Zhuan” ( ) of the Han-Shu ( ). One national journal in the mainland China is currently entitled ‘Qiu-Shi’ ( ), meaning pursuing truth. Note that, the character ‘shi’ in this context, strictly speaking, is used as a demonstrative pronoun which points to the source of the truth, i.e., the real situation or the way things are, which is what ‘shi-shi’ ( ) denotes. The translation of ‘shi’ ( ), ‘what this is’, in my paraphrase of this predicative proverb in the main text (‘to pursue/capture what this is based on the real situation [or on the way things are]’, or simply, ‘to pursue/capture the way things are’) is actually an extended meaning in the context of the demonstrative use of the character ‘shi’. As I see it, this predicative proverb is a good example to show how the two uses, or two meanings, of ‘shi’ mentioned in the previous note is connected. 23. See Chapter “Ding-Fa” ( ) of the Han-Fei-Zi ( ) [the Chinese original text]. It is interesting to note this: two appearances of the term ‘shi’ ( ) in the phrase ‘zheshi’ (or ‘zhe-qi-shi’) in two distinct contexts (i.e., that of ‘she-gao-xiang-zuo-er-ze-qi-shi’ and that of ‘xun-ming-er-ze-shi’ ) in this chapter suggest that what the term expresses (i.e., the way things are) can be either the way things are in the actual world or the way things are in some reality conceptually introduced/speciﬁed. This observation is relevant to one point about the ontological neutrality of the notion of truth per se to be explained in Section 6.3.1 of the last chapter. 24. Actually, there is one more thing that is implicitly involved in ‘qiu-shi’, that is, the subject who performs the action of pursuing, indicated by the term ‘qiu’ ( ). The implied subject of such predicates as ‘qiu’ is rather an agent who performs pursuing what it is in a process or in a dynamic way than a static sentence or proposition that corresponds to the fact once for all or in a static way. See relevant discussion of this topic in Section 4.4 of the previous chapter and Sections 5.2 and 5.3 of the current chapter. 25. Surely, we are neither ancient Chinese nor ancient Greek people. However, given the paraphrase-reduction explanation of any speciﬁc semantic ascent ways of talking about truth in different folk and reﬂective traditions, all available relevant evidence (as far as what I have seen are concerned) shows that people in different cultural traditions and at different times share roughly the same pre-theoretic understanding of truth to the effect that truth consists in capturing the way things are, no matter what kinds of (positive or negative) theoretic elaborations were given by thinkers in these traditions. For the sake of space and goal of this writing, it is clear that I cannot carry out such extensive historical examination of all the relevant evidence here. I thus take the above conclusion as a reasonable assumption in this work. 26. For my relevant discussion of how differences in the two kinds of languages bear on their distinct ways of delivering some of their metaphysical ideas, see Mou (1999).

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27. The counterparts in the Greek and Latin, ‘aletheia’ and ‘veritas’, of the English word ‘truth’ are also single terms with few syllables. 28. If such a creation ﬁrst appears in the oral version of the folk language, one thing that matters is to use the ready-made phonetic primitives or their combination to imitate a certain pronunciation in the folk oral language. 29. For those semantically sensitive construction principles, see my discussion in Mou (1998). 30. When saying ‘more or less nominalistically-oriented’, I do not mean being radicallynominalistically interpretation of the features of Chinese ideographic language, which denies the existence of conceptual universals or indispensable role played by conceptual abstraction in any language including Chinese language. 31. Example, cf., Socrates’ elenchus-method presented in Plato‘s dialogue ‘Euthyphro’. 32. For my detailed discussion of these two approaches as two representative methodological perspectives, see Mou (2001c). 33. William Alston (1996, p. 5). 34. Susan Haack (2008, p. 24).

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