Category Archives: Chinese philosophy – 中國哲學 – 中国哲学

Flourishing, the Non-moral Good, & Virtue Ethics

Here’s an issue that I think is relevant to any view about “flourishing” attributed to early Chinese philosophy. If the basic idea of flourishing is some idea about faring well, or “welfare,” we can ask what it takes conceptually to have such an idea. What comes to mind for me is that there has to be some notion of a person’s good, where that good is construed in some way independent of acting correctly–i.e. it has to be a notion of a person’s “non-moral” good. Even as I write that, I’m not quite sure what the reason for that is, but it seems important to me to keep welfare distinct from rightness. I might be totally wrong, but my philosophical instincts whisper otherwise.

The reason this seems important to me vis-a-vis early Chinese philosophy is that it seems like the non-moral good is featured in the Mohist idea of benefit, li 利. But li is not taken as theoretically central or even relevant in the Analects and the Mencius. Maybe it is important in the Xunzi, but I think that is because the Xunzi has a consequentialist view like the Mozi. If any of this is on the right track, then there is not in fact any virtue ethics in early China, in the sense that Van Norden and others think there to be. A lot rides on the idea of flourishing as relying on that of the non-moral good, and hence as being construed independently of rightness, so I wonder what can be said in favor of or against that…

For New England Area Types

Steve Angle has organized, with Michael Slote, an NEH seminar at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut on “Confucianism and Virtue Ethics.” It is to run from July 7 to August 15. Steve opens the lecture sessions to anyone who is interested and willing. Here (pasted from email) is the schedule for the lecture sessions, along with what Steve has to say by way of invitation:

“It occurred to me that maybe you could post something on the blog about the speakers who will be coming to Middletown for the summer seminar. It would be neat to have a mini-get-together or two. The details I have now are:

May Sim, Holy Cross — July 10
Bryan Van Norden, Vassar — July 15
Shirong Luo, Simmons — July 17
Eric Hutton, Utah — July 24

All lectures held at the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, beginning at 3:30. I encourage anyone planning on coming from out of town to let me know.

Thanks!

Steve”

(I know I will be at some of these, since I am relatively close by; it would be nice to meet some of you out there if you are also able to make it! Also, Chris Panza, who writes the blog “A Ku Indeed!” will be a seminar attendee. -Manyul)

Book Review – brief but not shamelessly so

Here is some of the draft of my review of Van Norden’s Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy for Journal of Asian Studies. The word-limit for the review was very low (800 words!); I didn’t really meet it, but it did make me focus, largely on methodology. Keep in mind that this wasn’t so much written for philosophers but for the broader JAS readership. Other reviews, longer and written for philosophers, are sure to give better due to details of Van Norden’s book. Nonetheless, I welcome any comments and edifying criticism.

************************************

Two aspects of Van Norden’s interpretation that mark it as distinctively philosophical are (a) the presentation of early Chinese texts as sets of philosophically systematic “views,” and (b) the presentation of such views as in some sense “defensible,” though not perfectly so. The stated underpinning for both is Van Norden’s rendering of Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of restoration”—as opposed to the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—using principles of interpretation derived from the “meaning holism” views of 20th century American philosophers W.V.O. Quine and Donald Davidson. There are two: the principle of charity and that of humanity. By the principle of charity, one interprets the utterances of others in such a way that they are not attributed beliefs “we regard as not just false, but absurdly so” (6) on a systematic scale. On the other hand, by the principle of humanity, one attributes false beliefs to others “if an understanding of their larger linguistic and social context explains how humans who are substantially like us could have held those beliefs in that context” (7-8). However, these are minimally constrictive principles at best and they cannot really distinguish the hermeneutics of restoration from that of suspicion for Van Norden. As he should be aware, the principles of charity and humanity are meant primarily to provide theoretical explanation for how linguistic interpretation is possible at all, either interpersonal or intercultural, given the apparently vicious circle of meaning holism: “words have meaning because of the roles they play in sentences, and sentences have meaning because of the words that make them up” (7). More strongly, they seem to be “transcendental” principles in an important sense: they do much more to explain how linguistic communication is possible than to provide useful tools of actual translation and interpretation in the usual case. If meaning holism a la Quine and Davidson is right then we must be governed by interpretive charity and humanity—they are not optional virtues of interpretation. So, even the hermeneutics of suspicion must rely on these principles to make bare sense of the meanings of texts. More important to “suspicion” is maintaining critical distance from such first-order meanings in order to gain traction on the meanings of those meanings, according to some theory of their political, social, or psychological genealogy. Van Norden cites Ricoeur’s labeling of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as “masters of suspicion,” also adding Foucault to the list (4); consideration of these figures should make the point about critical distance and second-order meaning obvious. There is, therefore, a false dichotomy under which Van Norden is working. One need not approach the text either from an angle of critical suspicion or from that of interested engagement. There is at least a third option: one might approach, as many Sinologists are wont to do, from the point of view of historical restoration without interested concern for philosophical engagement with the resulting, interpreted set of views.

Hermeneutic principles aside, what justifies a reading of early Chinese texts that engages their meanings on the first-order level and regards them seriously as being engaged in something that is relevant to contemporary discourse on ethics? Why not regard them as texts that reflect concerns, motives, and worldviews bound—and limited—by cogency to a specific time and place, and that address others who are so situated? I think there are two answers, expressed somewhat more persuasively in Van Norden’s actual interpretations than in his ardent apologia for them.

First, there seem in fact to be undeniable aspects of “virtue ethics” in the views of Kongzi and Mengzi. (Van Norden provides a lengthy argument for attributing sayings in portions of the Lunyu 論語 to Kongzi (65-96); a much briefer one, following consensus, for Mengzi and the Mengzi 孟子 (211-13).) This is partly due to the origin of contemporary interest in virtue ethics—and coining of that term—in disenchantment among some prominent philosophers in the past thirty years with the impersonal, principle-based core of modern ethical theory. Many adherents of this backlash movement have looked to pre-modern ethical views, particularly those of Aristotle, for a model of ethical reflection more harmonious with human beings as concerned with situated personal goals and aspirations rather than as locations of rational-choice in an abstract moral universe. Though one may argue with details, Van Norden makes a compelling case for reformulating the pre-modern concerns expressed in the Lunyu and Mengzi through the constellation of concerns he identifies as “components of a virtue ethics” (37-59): flourishing, virtues, ethical cultivation, and a philosophical anthropology. Likewise, Van Norden’s portrayal of the Mozi and his followers as consequentialists engaged in a dialectic against the Ruist followers of Kongzi is nuanced and complex, read as it is through a similar dialectic found between contemporary consequentialists and proponents of virtue ethics.

Second, the ultimate justification for Van Norden’s hermeneutic of engagement must be found, I think, in disciplinary direction and temperament. He is, by profession, a philosopher. Philosophers are interested in the relationship between ethics and truth—and sometimes also in discovering ethical truths. It is the latter that motivates Van Norden’s interest in the historical material in the first place; so engagement with the first-order meanings found in the text is, in his eyes, important to that task. As he puts it, citing one of his mentors,

…it would be nothing more than necrophilia to reproduce without alteration some historical position. …Generally speaking, if we wish to engage in the “historical retrieval” of earlier philosophical views, our goals should be to produce a position that is, in Lee Yearley’s formulation, “credible” and “appropriate.” Our interpretation should be “credible” in the sense that it is plausible for us today. …But at the same time historical retrieval should result in a position that is “appropriate” in the sense that it is faithful to the philosophy that inspires it. (323)

This attitude also underlies perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book, a chapter on “Pluralistic Ruism” in which Van Norden lays the groundwork for a continuation of the Ruist ethical tradition, modified in important ways to accommodate aspects of the modern condition, especially a commitment to pluralism of values and the corresponding visions of flourishing that can justify those values within a virtue ethics approach.

Hall and Ames–"Postmodern"?

A comment on Van Norden’s uses of the term postmodern in Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy:

Van Norden often refers to the approach that Roger Ames and David Hall take toward Chinese texts as “postmodern.” Based on Van Norden’s own depiction of postmodernism, there’s something puzzling in this tendency. Here is Van Norden on postmodernism:

“The term has been in use since the early twentieth century and is used by different thinkers in different ways in different intellectual disciplines. However, one of the most influential characterizations was given by Jean-Francois Lyotard, who described it as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives.’ I take him to mean the following. A narrative is any account or story, such as evolutionary theory. A metanarrative is a story about why a particular narrative is justified, or why we ought to believe it. …However, postmodernism’s ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ means not believing that any metanarrative is justified. In other words, one does not regard as objectively warranted any claims to truth.” (VECECP, 3)

Here are a couple of central snippets (can snippets be central?) from Ames’ and Hall’s “Apologia” for their approach in Thinking Through Confucius:

“We have openly resorted to a method which we shall term (before our critics, with less constructive intent, have a chance to do so) ‘cross-cultural anachronism.’ That is to say, we have sought to understand the thinking of Confucius by recourse to issues originating within contemporary Western philosophic culture, issues which Confucius may well have not explicitly entertained. Although this method has required frequent resort to anachronistic references, our ultimate aim has been to provide the grounds for arriving at a more accurate picture of Confucius’ thinking independent of such reference.” (TTC, 7; emphasis added)

“We wish to challenge the understanding of Confucius’ Analects as a mere repository of culture-bound ethical norms relevant to the origin and development of classical Chinese culture, and to promote the relevance of his vision as a potential participant in present philosophic conversations.” (TTC, 6; emphasis added)

It doesn’t seem very clear that Ames and Hall are postmodern in the sense Van Norden identifies as influential. If anything, the two desiderata of historical accuracy and relevance expressed by them seem to make their project very much like Van Norden’s, at least in aim. But maybe there are aspects of Ames and Hall that are postmodern in some other sense than Lyotard’s. Van Norden hints at another sense in this comment:

“…the post modernists [such as Ames and Hall] are right that any faithful interpretation of Ruism will not attribute to it any sort of Cartesianism. Ruists are not metaphysical dualists, nor are they epistemological foundationalists. …It is certainly true that Ruism is not ‘modernist,’ but this does not entail that it is ‘postmodernist.’ Readings of the original texts that make it seem that Ruists advocate creativity unconstrained by human nature, Heaven, and tradition seem very forced to me. Furthermore, precisely because the postmodern interpretation of Ruism renders it so similar to Rortian pragmatism, it offers nothing inspiringly new to contemporary debates. Finally, if our choices are between modernism, postmodernism, and a hermeneutic approach, I find the third the most promising.” (VECECP, 324-5)

I have two thoughts here. First, it seems like Van Norden is being unhelpfully loose, terminologically. He doesn’t mean that Ames and Hall are themselves postmodern in their approach (maybe he thinks this, but that doesn’t seem to be his point here). He means that they attribute to the early Chinese views that are characterizable as postmodernist–Ames and Hall’s interpretation “renders” Ruism “so similar to Rortian pragmatism.” But then, second, it seems like Van Norden should distinguish Rortian pragmatism from Lyotard’s postmodernism. Unless I’m mistaken, Rorty’s view is not that we should be incredulous toward any metanarrative, but that we should be incredulous toward thinking of the metanarrative as somehow providing non-contingent, “externally objective” grounding, grounding that could serve us in some (modernist) foundationalist sense. Nonetheless, a metanarrative can serve us with the right sense of our own historical contingency and its relationship to the metanarrative. In that sense, Rorty’s view is postmodern–in rejecting foundationalism; but I don’t think in that sense Rorty’s view is any different from what Van Norden glosses in the following footnote as the “hermeneutic” approach to philosophy that he favors:

“By ‘hermeneutics’ here I mean not just the position of H-G. Gadamer…but rather the broad range of positions that agree with postmodernism in rejecting Cartesian foundationalism but seek to retain the ideal of philosophical progress through dialogue and constructive argumentation.” (VECECP, 325 fn.4)

That doesn’t seem very different from Rortian pragmatism but maybe someone who knows Rorty’s views better can correct me.

In any case, on the Ames and Hall approach, the pragmatism template is self-consciously applied to early Chinese texts because they think it helps to make the text, particularly certain terms, more coherent in an overall reading of the text. I’m not sure why it is cogent criticism of the approach that it doesn’t provide anything “inspiringly new to contemporary debates.” That makes it seem like if you can’t make an ancient text seem inspiringly interesting to contemporary debates, then your interpretation is no good.

Comments welcome!

The Lexical Fallacy

I’m working on a review of Bryan Van Norden’s book, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy. There is a very interesting discussion in his Introduction about what he calls “the lexical fallacy,” a fallacy that he notes was first pointed out to him by Kwong-loi Shun, in conversation.

Van Norden quotes Henry Rosemont (from “Against Relativism” (1988 ) in Larson and Deutsch’s Interpreting Across Boundaries), who actually formulates and uses the lexical principle that Bryan asserts to be fallacious. Let’s call it ‘L’:

(L) “…the only way it can be maintained that a particular concept was held by an author is to find a term expressing that concept in his text. Thus we cannot say so-and-so had a ‘theory of X,’ or that he ‘espoused X principles,’ if there is no X in the lexicon of the language in which the author wrote.” (Rosemont p. 41, footnote 11).

Maybe there is something fallacious about the principle. But Van Norden’s argument for its fallaciousness seems to rely solely on apparent counterexamples. Here they are (all from Van Norden p. 22)–I’ll number them so we can refer to them in discussion:

(C1) “…it seems clear that Anaximander and Anaximenes were doing philosophy, had views about philosophy, and (in some sense) had the concept of philosophy, even though both lived before the Greek term for philosophy, ‘philosophia,’ was coined by the Pythagoreans.”

(C2) “…Aristotle claims that there are ‘unnamed virtues,’ by which he means virtues that he has a concept for but which do not have names in Greek.”

(C3) “…outside of crossword puzzle fans and those in the shoelace industry, almost no English speakers know the word ‘aglet.’ However, I submit that almost all English speakers have the concept of ‘the plastic or metal tip on the end of a shoelace.’

The principle is fallacious, Van Norden further clarifies, because it requires one-to-one lexical correspondence (pp. 22-23): “A slightly different kind of case that illustrates why the lexical fallacy is a fallacy is that of someone who has no one word for a concept because she has several words for one concept.” Bryan asks:

(Q1) “Do we speakers of English not have the concept that corresponds to the contemporary Chinese ‘wo 我’ because we use two different words that translate it in different contexts: ‘I’ and ‘me’?”

(Q2) “Do speakers of contemporary Chinese not have the concept of ‘million’ because they have to use a phrase to express it rather than one lexical item (‘bai wan 百萬,’ literally ‘hundred ten-thousands’)?

I have a few questions that I hope we can discuss here.

First, what do we think of these counterexamples? Are they obvious?

Second, what would be the reason, or argument, that explains why L is fallacious and therefore why C1-C3 are counterexamples to L?

Third, is L something of a “straw man”? Is there some more plausible lexical principle that Rosemont should be after, for his purpose (which I assume is to invite a skeptical attitude toward projects like Bryan’s that take there to be in China theories of virtue or of human rights or whatever despite, let’s suppose, there being no clear “one-to-one” translatable Chinese term). Maybe there is some lexical principle like L that does not require one-to-one lexical correspondence but instead some other lexical correspondence?

Lot’s of questions. Please feel free to comment in any sort of way…

Such a deal…

Thanks to Yuri Pines for the link.

(http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-06/05/content_6737093.htm)

Parents call on Confucius for exam good fortune

By Cao Li (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-05 08:12

The Temple of Confucius in the center of Shanghai’s old town was unusually full Wednesday morning.

Crowds of people, most of them in their 40s and 50s, burned incense, lit candles and prayed in and around Dacheng Hall where there is a sculpture of Confucius and also where national exams were held during the times of the imperial dynasties.

The good luck notes they hung on the trellises and trees outside the hall gave away their reasons for being there. Most read something like, “Dear Confucius, please help my son/daughter in the college entrance exam”.


A visitor hangs a good-luck tablet on a shelf at the Temple of Confucius in Beijing June 3, 2008. [Asianewsphoto]

With the national examinations starting on Saturday, a growing number of parents have turned to Confucius, as a way to ease the pressure.

A cleaner at the temple, surnamed Xu, told China Daily that local people hardly ever visit the temple, but in the past week, hundreds of them had been.

“There are so many visitors coming these days, all the oil and incense burners keep filling up and I have to empty them several times a day,” Xu said.

Visitors pay 12 yuan ($1.75) for a piece of notepaper, incense sticks, two candles and a length of red ribbon.

At the Temple of Confucius in Beijing, visitors have to pay 188 yuan for a wooden tablet on which to write their wishes, although the shelf on which these are then placed is now full, the Beijing Youth Daily reported Wednesday.

One of the visitors at the Shanghai temple Wednesday was 47-year-old Ye Qing. She said she was making a wish for her son who is hoping to study telecommunication engineering at East China Normal University.

“It will work if I am sincere enough,” she said.

About 100,000 Shanghai students will sit the college entrance exam between Saturday and Monday, and their parents are doubtless all hoping for the same good fortune.

Many, like Ye, have booked hotel rooms close to the test venues.

Staff at several hotels in the city’s Minhang district said they have been taking bookings since the beginning of last month, and many are now full, the Xinmin Evening News reported.

Sun Yu, a teacher at the Shanghai Foreign Language School, said parents are prepared to do whatever they can to help their children succeed, including enrolling them in expensive, extracurricular classes.

High school student Vicky Yang said all her classmates spend at least 500 yuan a month on exam-related books and extra lessons.

“Some pay up to 20,000 yuan a semester for classes that promise to help students secure a university place,” she said.

Apart from books and classes, parents also buy their children special tonics to drink, Yang said.

“If you collected up all the empty bottles of tonic my classmates have drunk, you could make a small hill.”

Report from Hong Kong

I’m just about to leave Hong Kong, where for the past two days we’ve been celebrating Chad Hansen and his work–he’s had to retire from HKU because of its mandatory retirement policy. What a great conference, organized by Chris Fraser, Timothy O’Leary, and Dan Robins! And what a great bunch of people there were, especially all his colleagues and students that I met in the HKU Philosophy Department!

(At some point this summer, Chad will be guest-blogging; that should be quite a treat. Keep an eye out for other guest-bloggers this summer as well.)

We’ll start doing more philosophy here in a couple of days after I get back to the States…I promise.

Naturalism & Metaphysics in Early China, part I

I’d like to sneak up on an interpretive issue about early Chinese philosophy from a couple of directions–call them “tentative pincers.” This post will be part I of a two-parter; it will deal with one of the pincers.

The interpretive issue is this: what can we attribute by way of ontology to the early Chinese? (So, as you can see, this is a really minor topic…ha ha.) Chad Hansen has argued at length about this in A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (passim). He argues that the whole package of abstract objects (ideas, minds, meanings, etc.) that comes from an Indo-European linguistic base for philosophical speculation, should be left out of a proper understanding of the early Chinese thinkers. The latter have at base a much more pragmatically oriented conception and/or use for language. So, the early Chinese see language primarily as a guidance system. That should color the views we attribute to them–ontological commitments do not venture beyond what is necessary for “getting about” in the world, with the result, for example, that we should understand concern with dao 道 “naturalistically” to be concern with ways of doing, rather than metaphysically to be concerned with some “supernatural,” perhaps abstract, thing to be revered. That’s of course a very cursory summary of Hansen, but we could talk more detail as it comes up. What I wanted to do was to take one step back from Hansen’s approach and discuss a couple of topics that strike me as necessary to clarify prior to Hansen’s argument: naturalism, on the one hand, and “the metaphysical,” on the other. So in this part, we’ll discuss naturalism.

Naturalism

How should we construe “naturalism” in the early Chinese context? I feel like I have some handle on naturalism, but only as a set of commitments of philosophers after the rise of empiricism in its various forms. How do we construe a pre-empiricist philosopher, either in the East or the West, as holding to naturalism? That might seem simple at first: any philosopher who explicitly or implicitly holds to a set of commitments identical to those of naturalism after empiricism is a naturalist. The problem, it seems to me, is that the going understanding of philosophical naturalisms requires someone who is a naturalist to constrain either their method or ontology through some form of reflective equilibrium with empirical science. Here’s why.

There are different ways to characterize views that are regarded philosophically as naturalistic. In recent analyses, at least two large categories of naturalism have been distinguished: methodological and substantive. Alvin Goldman (“A Priori Warrant and Naturalistic Epistemology” Philosophical Perspectives 13) characterizes the two kinds of naturalism, using “metaphysical” in place of “substantive”:

Some forms of naturalism involve metaphysical theses—for example, the thesis that everything in the world either is physical or supervenes on the physical—and some forms of naturalism involve methodological doctrines—for example the doctrine that proper methodology is purely empirical. (p. 2)

Substantive naturalism holds less interest for many contemporary philosophers because of its dogmatic, or potentially question-begging, flavor. Brian Leiter (“Naturalism in Legal Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2002/entries/lawphil-naturalism/>.) provides a useful expanded discussion of methodological naturalism, which holds more appeal and has a more complicated relationship with the empirical:

Naturalism in philosophy is most often a methodological view to the effect that philosophical theorizing should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences. Such a view need not presuppose a solution to the so-called “demarcation problem”—i.e., the problem of what demarcates genuine science from pseudo-science—as long as there remain clear, paradigmatic cases of successful sciences. Some M-naturalists [i.e. methodological naturalists] want “continuity with” only the hard or physical sciences (Hard M-naturalists); others seek “continuity with” any successful science, natural or social (Soft M-naturalists). Soft M-naturalism is probably the dominant strand in philosophy today.

Assuming then that use of empirical inquiry can be demarcated, so that genuine sciences can be identified, methodological naturalism involves preservation of continuity, or coherence, of one’s own inquiries with a larger class of inquiries. “Continuity with” successful science, however, can be further spelled out by what Leiter refers to as “Results Continuity” and “Methods Continuity.” The former

…requires that the substantive claims of philosophical theories be supported or justified by the results of the sciences…. Moral philosophers like Gibbard and Railton, despite profound substantive disagreements, both think that a satisfactory account of morality’s nature and function must be supported by the results of evolutionary biology, our best going theory for how we got to be the way we are…. A philosophical account of morality that explains its nature and function in ways that would be impossible according to evolutionary theory would not, by naturalistic scruples, be an acceptable philosophical theory.

By contrast, Methods Continuity

…demands only that philosophical theories emulate the “methods” of inquiry of successful sciences. “Methods” should be construed broadly here to encompass not only, say, the experimental method, but also the styles of explanation (e.g., via appeal to causes that determine, ceteris paribus, their effects) employed in the sciences.

Understanding naturalism in these ways, it seems to me like naturalism of any sort has to privilege modern, contemporary science. For example, to be a “naturalist” about ethics, broadly speaking, is to think that the concepts and justifications in ethical theories ought to be constrained by what the available science deems likely to be true of the world, whether it is the kinds of properties and causes that exist generally for various kinds of events and objects, or the psychological explanations that exist for the actions and attitudes of humans and other animals. Alternatively, we could think of naturalism to involve not so much a direct constraint from available science, but at least a hearty commitment to reflective equilibrium that takes seriously into account the picture of the world that the empirical sciences portray.

So, here are some questions I’m mulling: Can empirical science, or empiricism more generally, be attributed to the early Chinese context? On the other hand, does it even seem necessary to connect naturalism to empiricism? Can “naturalism” or “naturalistic” be applied usefully to the early Chinese thinkers without attributing empiricism? Am I being too narrow in construing philosophical naturalism in the ways cited above?

Analogical Reasoning — not just ordinary inference?

Some commentators seem to regard “analogical reasoning” to be a distinct form of reasoning in the early Chinese philosophical context, attributable mostly to the later Mohists and to Mencius. So far as I’ve been able to understand it, the distinctiveness of such reasoning seems suspect; but I’m not 100 percent sure I’ve understood it correctly.

Part of the issue seems to be that we get an account of the method or technique of reasoning in the later Mohist canons, but we get what some people consider the most explicit, or at least self-conscious, use (or misuse) of the method in the Mencius. “Argument” in Mencius, according to most commentators, seems primarily to work on a model of analogy.

There is the statement from 3B9 of the Mencius that Mencius sees himself as engaged in bian 辯, “disputation,” in response to the Mohists. There are technical discussions in the later Mohist writings about the various modes of bian. Among them is the technique called tui 推, “to push” or “to extend.” As A. C. Graham translates the definition of the technique (A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science, 483), to tui is “…using what is the same in that which he refuses to accept and that which he does accept in order to propose the former” (tui ye zhe yi qi suo bu qu zhi tong yu qi suo qu zhe yu zhi ye 推也者以其所不取之同於其所取者予之也). So, as the later Mohists understand it, in this technique, one “pushes” the opponent’s judgment from a case he already accepts to another case, using something that both cases have in common. Hence this has often been called the method of “analogical inference.”

But now, consider the following reconstruction of so-called “analogical inference,” using the example from Mencius 1A7 that both Graham and Nivison examine as an example of such inference. The example is Xuan’s compassionate response to the ox being taken away to slaughter and the analogous case of his people, the people of Qi, who also seem to require compassionate response. Graham, Nivison, and most others think there’s an inference, then, that Mencius encourages Xuan to make.

Here’s what it seems to me to take, to go from the one case to the other:
1. Xuan ought to feel compassion for O, because O possesses F.
2. Q also possesses F.
3. Therefore, Xuan ought also to feel compassion for Q.

But it seems like we can further analyze 1 as relying on a suppressed premise, one which says something more general about feeling compassion for objects possessing F. If we push the analysis further, the entire inference involved in the case of this “analogical” inference seems most plausibly to be the following:
A. Xuan ought to feel compassion for objects that possess F.
B. O possesses F.
C. Xuan ought to feel compassion for O. (from A, B)
D. Q (also) possesses F.
E. Xuan (also) ought to feel compassion for Q. (from A, D)
A-E seems to spell out more explicitly how the Mohist principle of extending, which is the principle of applying rational pressure to treat similar cases similarly, would actually apply the rational pressure of maintaining consistency among one’s judgments. But then the technique of tui 推 is not so distinct or different from regular, boring inference. This raises two questions for me:

Q1) Have I misunderstood or misconstrued the technique?

Q2) Was I looking for something unreasonable in looking for something distinct or different in a reasoning technique in the first place? In other words, should we think, “Of course it turns out that analogical reasoning is just a familiar form of reasoning!”?