Review: Desultory Notes on Language and Semantics in Ancient China Author(s): William G.

Boltz Reviewed work(s): Language and Logic in Ancient China by Chad Hansen Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 105, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1985), pp. 309313 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/601710 Accessed: 20/10/2008 08:29
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DESULTORY NOTES ON LANGUAGE AND SEMANTICS IN ANCIENT CHINA

WILLIAMG. BOLTZ
OF UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON Professor Hansen takes the observation that all nouns in Chinese are mass nouns as the starting point for an investigation of how the Chinese view of the relation between things and their names is fundamentally different from that which is characteristically found in cultures where Indo-European languages are spoken. In particular he re-analyzes those parts of the Mo tzu and the Kung-sun Lung tzu that deal with logic and logical arguments, in the light of his claims about the structure of Classical Chinese nouns. The work suffers from considerable carelessness and sloppiness in terminology and thesis, as well as being flawed in its presentation of the relevant parts of Classical Chinese grammar.

To KNOW WHAT THE PEOPLE of an ancient culture

believed, and how they thought, it is necessary first to read what they wrote. Beyond this obvious requirement it has not infrequently occurred to students and scholars of ancient cultures that the language in which those texts are written, and which, perhaps in a less refined form, those people spoke, may itself constitute the next best approach to such questions. Ever since Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf allowed for the possibility that the structure and categories of a person's language may impose a certain form on that person's thinking the idea that "language shapes thought" has held a sometimes irresistible allure for critics, analysts, and exegetes of philosophy and metaphysics. In the case of China, because Chinese differs from the Indo-European languages in ways that speakers, of the latter consider significant, this idea has exerted a particularly strong influence on Western studies of language and thought in ancient China.' Professor Hansen's book presents us now with the most specific,
* This is a review article of Language and Logic in Ancient China. By Chad Hansen. Pp. x + 207. Ann Arbor: THE UNIVERSITY MICHIGAN PRESS OF (Michigan Studies on China Series), 1983. $25.00. For a good example of the extent to which notions about the way in which language is perceived as influencing thought can be carried, see Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, rev. English translation edited by Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1964); for China, see esp. pp. 175-294.

most sophisticated, and most carefully adumbrated version yet of this claim. Hansen bases his claim largely on the consequences of a single feature of Chinese, namely the supposition that all nouns behave in the grammar like mass nouns, none like count nouns. That is to say, all Chinese nouns are comparable to English "honey," which designates a universal but discontinuous mass, and can be neither counted nor made plural without the use of a measure word of some kind, e.g., "a comb of ... "
"two jars of ... ;" and no Chinese noun is comparable

to English "beehive," which stands for a single, countable item. Hansen calls this observation about Chinese nouns the "Mass Noun Hypothesis," and makes it the cornerstone of his speculative edifice. He argues for its validity in general for all varieties of Chinese, ancient and modern alike, but since his hermeneutic interests lie in pre-Han texts the real thrust of his claim is centered squarely on Classical Chinese. The Mass Noun Hypothesis is in itself neither especially novel nor particularly controversial; it has long been recognized as valid for modern Chinese. But for Classical Chinese it is only partially true. Nouns in Classical Chinese can be counted directly without the use of a measure word, and to this extent they behave like count nouns. Hansen acknowledges this fact, but does not let it shake his faith in the fundamental status of the Mass Noun Hypothesis. He says only that the nouns "in the language of the pre-Han philosophers seemed like hybrids," and that "this produced puzzles for the pre-Han semanticists, the Neo-Mohists." (p. 33.) Rather than using the term "hybrid,"with its somewhat inapplicable biological connotations, it might be better 309

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Journal of the American Oriental Society 105.2 (1985) Given this understanding of nominalism, Hansen points out that to look for an explanation of the Kungsun Lung tzu's pai ma fei ma (- .% ~ .-. "paradox" based on semantic abstractions like "whiteness" is irrelevant and pointless since Chinese philosophy is not based on the assumption that the semantic relation of names to things is a one-many relationship." (p. 143.) Essential to the discussions of the meaning of both the Kung-sun Lung tzu and the Mo tzu passages is a clear understanding of two fundamental terms, and how they apply to the arguments of the texts: t'i 4 (printed scriptum nipponicum, 4, in Hansen's book), and chien ,. The first, in a casual sense means, of course, "body, substance," but in the formal sense of these texts Hansen translates if as mass-stuff. The latter, meaning in simple terms "conjunction, union" formally designates a "compound" of two t'i such that it includes anything that is either one of the two. Thus the expression niu-ma 't-. is a chien of the two t'i niu and ma, referring to everything that is either niu or ma. It is the sum, in other words, of these two t'i, and Hansen translates the word chien as mass-sum. A. C. Graham explains t'i and chien as fundamentally numerical, designating them as "unit" and "total" respectively. And he goes on to point out that "any chien may in turn be treated as a t'i and counted as one in a new total."3 The rub comes when we realize, as did the pre-Han Chinese, that besides mass-sum compounding there is also what Hansen calls mass-product compounding, that is, names that designate the intersection (or overlapping) of two things, such that the compound X Y names everything that is both X and Y. The stock (-7 "hard-white." But such example is chien-pai compounds are not chien compounds because the X and Y terms of a chien compound are t'i "corporeal stuffs." Hansen calls these terms "non-corporeal stuffs," and says that compounds of them for the Neo-Mohists are "mass-products in which the stuffs interpenetrate," and that the relation between these non-corporeal stuffs, and their mass-product compounds "should be relative in the same way the t'i-chien relation is." (p. 158.) By that he means that such a compound, like a chien compound, can also be a single term in a higher level compound. It is the different way that these entities, and these compounds, are understood that characterizes the different "concepts of language" underlying the Mo tzu and the Kung-sun Lung tzu, the latter being the more uncompromising of the two. For the Neo-Mohists niu3

if we describe Classical Chinese nouns as neutral with respect to the "mass/count" dichotomy. We would then like to know how their neutrality in this regard affects the force of the Mass Noun Hypothesis and its implications. What is new here is Hansen's attempt to make sense out of certain parts of the Mo tzu, and the Kung-sun Lung tzu based on the Mass Noun Hypothesis, and its general implications for understanding Chinese thinking. "Behavioral Nominalism" is the term Hansen gives to the Chinese view shaped by the effect of the Mass Noun Hypothesis. He characterizes this view as follows: whichhavea consistsof ming A "names" Language ' Chineseontolone-to-onerelationto shih "stuffs." For set ogy ... is mereological. everyabstract of objects one can constructa concretemereological object by of all regarding of the members the set as one disconof tinuousstuff. Identifying differentmembers the set is the same as identifying different spatio-temporally partsof the same stuff. In learningnameswe learnto or discriminate divide realityinto these mereological on stuffswhichnamesname.Namingis not grounded the notion of an abstract concept, a property,an essence, or an ideal type, but rather on finding "boundaries" between things. Accordingly,Chinese of view minds not as repositories weird philosophers objectscalled ideas, but as the facultyencompassing the abilities and inclinationsto discriminatestuffs fromeachother.Thismassstuffviewcan be explained of by specialfeaturesof the logicalstructure Chinese nouns.(pp. 31-32.)2 2 The translationof shih as "stuff,"with the solecistic , pluralthat Hanseninsistson adding,can only strikeone as, at best,peculiar.Millerhas shownthat this was an important part of the vocabulary wherebythe Chineseexpressedtheir own view of their language;and that by medievaltimes it had becomea centraltechnicalterm in the nativelinguistic to tradition,standingas a complement hsii , "empty." (Roy
Andrew Miller, "The Far East," in Current Trends in Lin-

guistics 13.2, ed. ThomasA. Sebeok [The Hague:Mouton, 1973],p. 1227.) Hansen'suse of the technicalterm "mereological" boris rowedfrom the work of the Polish philosopher logician and Stanisfaw Lesniewski(1884-1939) who invented the term to "mereology" designatea theory of extended individuals and of certain special kinds of relationsbetweenpart and whole.Althoughit has come to referto any generaltheoryof the relationof partto whole,it is not clearhow the termadds to the precisionof Hansen'sargumentshere. See also the reviewby Christoph in Harbsmeier, EarlyChina9 (1984).

A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science

Press,1978),p. 265. (Hong Kong:ChineseUniversity

BOLTZ: Desultory Notes on Language and Semantics in Ancient China ma as a chien compound names the stuff that is constituted of all niu plus all ma in the universe; or some designated portion thereof. So both niu and ma are t'i "corporeal stuffs." But since the mass-sum niu-ma can function as a single t'i in a higher level chien compound, say niuma-hsiungt J' ,. ? ;, ox-horse and elder brother-younger brother" (= "draft animals and brothers"), it must at times be conceived of as a unitary entity. It is this variability between "now compound, now unitary" in the interpretation of terms like niu-ma and hsiung-ti that disturbed the Kung-sun Lung tzu partisans, who preferred to insist that a term be taken consistently one way or the other in all of its occurrences. Hansen's discussion of these matters is spread throughout the last third of the book, making it sometimes difficult to get a clear picture of his explanation or a clear sense of the direction of his arguments. Things that to him may be perfectly apparent, because they are so familiar, may be very obscure to those of us who do not truck in the argot of the philosopher on a daily basis. Had the University of Michigan Press editors given more attention to this aspect of the presentation, it would have made for a less confusing book. The problem is compounded by the haphazard way Chinese characters are sometimes present, sometimes absent, and sometimes wrong. A particularly unfortunate case of the last is the appearance of ~ on p. 150 in the heart of one of the explanations of chien and t'i when 4, is meant. Given the stock example of chien-pai J 7"hard-white"to illustrate mass-product compounding we are faced with a plethora of chien's on these pages, mostly without any characters given, and the consequent confusion to which this gives rise. Hansen's frequent references to the chien-pai "hardwhite" issue raises a further, and more significant issue, viz. the problem of the authenticity and reliability of the texts. Graham showed already in 1956 that the Kung-sun Lung tzu essay on "hard-white" was a late concoction, done sometime after A.D. 300, perhaps as late as A.D. 600, and further showed in 1967 how that "forgery" had colored all efforts to understand the Mo tzu references to "hard-white" for the next millennium and a half.4 The Mo tzu text itself is widely recognized as being substantially corrupt, and efforts

311

at emendation to make it understandable have been legion. The problem with this, as Hansen correctly points out (p. 103) is that the "understandableness" invoked to justify these emendations is no more than a particularperson's opinion about what the text "ought" to mean, often based on no more than her or his own philosophical and linguistic predispositions. Hansen suggests that "theory-based constraints" on both the emendation and interpretation of the text will keep the kind of free-wheeling conjectural emendations that have traditionally characterized textual studies of the Mo tzu and the Kung-sun Lung tzu in check. and Emendation, punctuation, the like oughtnot to be triggeredby a test of what makes sense to the but interpreter, by whatwouldhavemadesenseto the author,giventhe dominantoutlookof his philosophical milieu, the presuppositions, develcontemporary in philosophy, so on. (p. 103) and opments But this simply substitutes one kind of a priori presuppositions for another. Guesses about how a particular text conforms to the "dominant outlook" of the author's "philosophical milieu" are no better bases for textual emendation than are the textual critic's own biases, in spite of the formal sounding name, "theory-based constraints," that Hansen invokes. In practice Hansen has relied, as he freely acknowledges, on Graham's very thorough and very detailed textual studies, thereby avoiding having to confront that complicated issue himself. His concluding part of Chapter 5 is a translation and commentary of the "White Horse Paradox" (pp. 161-170), and here also we see a strong reliance on Graham's earlier work. While Hansen has made one or two changes in the order of the text, his translation follows Graham very closely. His discussion, of course, does not; because Graham included many textual arguments of no interest to Hansen who is concerned rather with the "philosophical exegesis" of the text. Apart from the vexing problem of textual authenticity and reliability there is one other primary consideration that must be commented on in such a study: the author's approach to and understanding of Classical Chinese grammar. In the course of his presentation of the Mass Noun Hypothesis in chapter 2 we are given some fairly detailed comments on how Hansen understands Classical Chinese grammar, and this reveals, regrettably, some serious misconceptions. For example: In Chinesethe distinctions betweenwhat we would describeas nounsand adjectives rathersubtle.... are Most graphscan occur either as terms or predicate

A. C. Graham,"TheCompositionof the GongsuenLong Tzyy," Asia Major, n.s. 5.2 (1956), 147-183 (erroneously "Selected and givenas 1957in Hansen's Bibliography"), "The 'Hard and White' Disputationsof the Chinese Sophists," Bulletinof the School of Orientaland African Studies 30 (1967),358-368.
4

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Journal of the American Oriental Society 105.2 (1985)

senexpressions.A celebrated exampleis Confucius's tence, "fu 'father'fu 'father'."There is no is, no predicate expressiondenotingidentityor inclusion,in Chinese,(p. 45.) To say that "the distinctions between . .. nouns and adjectives are rather subtle" is like saying "the distinctions between poker chips and gambling are rather subtle." A poker chip is a thing, and gambling is one of the things you can do with it. In a parallel way a "noun" is a thing, i.e., a word-class label, and "adjective," to the extent that it has any meaning in Classical Chinese grammar at all, designates one possible function of the things we call "nouns." Hansen has confused "word-class," which is entirely independent of sentence structure and usage, with "function," i.e., the way a word may be used in a sentence. There is no word-class "adjective" in Classical Chinese, nor are there any socalled "predicate adjectives" (e.g., "green," "great," "garish" in English). In Classical Chinese these are "verbs," no different from other verbs like "jump," "kick," and "dance." What Hansen means by "graphs" occurring "either as terms or predicate expressions" is a mystery, since, first of all, "graphs"are elements of a writing system, not of a language, secondly, "terms"is not a well-defined term, and in any case any "term"or "graph," if by these we mean "word," can occur in Classical Chinese as a predicate expression. Hansen has misunderstood the "celebratedexample"
from Lun vii X 1.I I fuuifu precisely because he

fails to recognize the distinction between word-class and function. Both fu's belong to the word-class "noun," indeed they are the same word. This is an inherent lexical property of the word fu "father," and has nothing to do with the word's use here or anywhere else. In the sentence Hansen cites the first fu is functioning as "subject," the second is functioning as a predicate. The reason "there is no is, no predicate expression denoting identity or inclusion" is because this is not an "identity" (i.e., equational or appositional) sentence. It is a predicative sentence where the predicate happens to be a word that belongs to the word-class "noun." It is a fundamental and general rule in Classical Chinese grammar that when a noun functions as a predicate the meaning is "the subject behaves in the way typical of, proper to, or expected of the noun." The sentence means "The father behaves the
way fathers are expected to behave," or ". . . ought to

(not equal to an identity!) to the subject of the sentence. If the sentence were equational as Hansen assumes it to be, it would have to end with a sentencefinal yeh e according to the rules of Classical Chinese grammar. Hansen does comment on this, and seems to regard the sentence as just a defective, or grammatically wanting, equational sentence. While such sentences do occur, of course, the pre-Han Chinese being no less vulnerable to grammatical lapses than anyone else, that this is not such a sentence is proved beyond dispute by the form of its negated counterpart a few lines later in the same Lun yii passage: viz. fu pu fu 3-?- 3 . The negative marker I/, as is well-known, can only' negate predicate sentences; the negative for . identities, i.e., equational sentences, is fei The foregoing brief grammatical excursus is not merely pedantic rambling or gratuitous fault-finding, but pertains directly to Hansen's understanding of the nature and structure of Classical Chinese, which in its turn determines how he arrives at, and conceives of, the Mass Noun Hypothesis, the cornerstone of his endeavor. That these misconceptions do not affect his subsequent discussions of the Mo tzu and the Kungsun Lung tzu passages more than they do is largely because, as we have said, Hansen has relied heavily on the work of A. C. Graham for the textual and grammatical aspects of his study. There is both in this chapter and throughout the work a somewhat dismaying failure to recognize the difference between a language and a writing system, and this muddies a good deal of Hansen's discussion on these matters. Not only does this include the simple sloppiness of saying "graph" or "character" when he means "word" but it leads to such startling misrepresentations of, and apparent misunderstandings of, the Chinese language and script as the following: Therearesomelinesof thoughtaboutmental entities which seem to be generatedby reflectionson our
ability to master an inflected phonemic language which would lack appeal if one's model of language were nonphonemic, that is, "pictographic"or "ideographic."

and Eachcharacter a one-syllable has .... pronunciation.

The characters provided a shared mode of communica-

or in the larger context of the whole behave...," Lun uii passage "If (or when) fathers behave in the way
proper to fathers . . .". This, like all Classical Chinese

tion among the differentChineselanguagessince it

(sic) did not represent any particular pronunciation. (both p. 47, emphasis added.) What on earth is meant by "an inflected phonemic

predicative sentences, attributes an action, or a state

BOLTZ: DesultorY Notes on Language and Semantics in Ancient China language" as opposed to a "nonphonemic... 'pictographic' or 'ideographic'" one? "Phonemic" has to do with the systematic analysis of the sounds of a language, according to some (but not all) phonological theories. "Pictographic" and "ideographic," to the extent that they are relevant to language at all, have to do with writing systems. All languages in the world, we make bold to assert, have sounds, and thus can be analyzed phonemically. Comparatively few languages have writing systems of any kind, and none has an "ideographic" writing system for the simple reason that there is in fact no such thing. In footnote 25 to this passage Hansen admits that he does not understand why "Chinese linguists" (and careful scholars of all kinds, I might add) "seem to prefer the term logographic" (p. 179, emphasis original.) A writing system by definition is a system for representing the sounds of a language graphically. It just so happens that individual graphs, or characters, in the Chinese script represent those sounds at the level of the word, like our numbers do, 1, 2, 3, .. ., not at the level of the single sound, as we are generally accustomed to because of our familiarity with the Roman alphabet. Writing represents the utterances of a language. Words may stand for ideas in some sense that satisfies the yearnings of philosophers and poets. But writing is a more mundane business, and stands only for the sounds of those words. In any case, in a society that is predominantly pre-literate, as all ancient societies must have been, and many modern ones still are, clearly the way the language is written can have virtually no effect on the way the speakers think, since it is entirely beyond the ken of the vast majority of them. In chapter 3, "Background and Theories of Language," Hansen identifies four categories of implicit assumptions that he thinks can be attributed to Chinese "classical thought about language"; (1) assumptions about the function of language, (2) about the way in which language relates to the real world, (3) about the origin and status of language, and (4) "miscellaneous contrasts in assumptions about the relation between language and mental or abstract objects" (pp. 57-58.) Beyond this, the chapter is a singularly confusing concatenation of short excurses on one or

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another of these assumptions as they appear to apply to various pre-Han texts, e.g., the Lao tzu, Chuang tzu, Lun yi, etc. Each short excursus is headed with a title, sometimes in italics, sometimes orthic, ranging from such benign captions as "The Tao Te Ching" to dizzying abstractions like "Nominalism in the Philosophy of Mind" (orthic) and "Monism and Mysticism" (italic). The problem in general is that Hansen has tried to cover too many complex issues too superficially. For him the attitudes toward language seen in, e.g., the Lao tzu or the Lun yii are "background," but in fact they are of comparable interest, comparable depth, and comparable significance, to those of the Neo-Mohists and Kung-sun Lung tzu that he deals with here. Much of the discussion in this "background" chapter, especially the sections dealing with "Confucius and the Rectification of Names," "Conventionalism," and "Nominalism" (pp. 77-82) could have profited from a reading of Roy Andrew Miller's substantial treatment of linguistic traditions in the Far East.5 In spite of the many criticisms raised about specific points in the foregoing pages, we must in conclusion see that the single most important general consideration is that Hansen has tried to see Chinese on its own terms, and to understand the texts more sinico, an approach that ought to seem the most natural, but one that in practice has not always been effectively pursued in the past. It is to Hansen's credit that he has forced the issue here. By scrutinizing the language in as great detail as he does, Hansen puts his understanding of the texts, and of the logic that underlies them, squarely on the nature of the language itself, resisting the impulse to see in the texts meanings, theories, concepts, and ideas of general philosophical currency that he does not find expressly attested in the language of the texts themselves. Hansen is not always careful, nor is he always right, but his motives and his seriousness of purpose, together with the many thought-provoking and provocative remarks and observations that he introduces throughout the work make this a book that repays careful reading. 5

Op. cit., n. 2.