Distinctions,Judgment,and.PDF

Distinctions, Judgment, and Reasoning in Classical Chinese Title Thought Author(s) Fraser, CJ Citation History and Philosophy of Logic, 2013, v. 34 n. 1, p. 1-24 Issued Date 2013 URL /10722/187890 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Rights NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Distinctions, judgment, and reasoning in classical Chinese thought CHRIS FRASER July 2012 Correspondence: Chris Fraser Associate Professor Department of Philosophy School of Humanities University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Rd, Hong Kong Email: fraser@hku.hk Fax: 852-2559-8452 Web: 2 Distinctions, judgment, and reasoning in classical Chinese thought Abstract The paper proposes an account of the prevailing classical Chinese conception of reasoning and argumentation that grounds it in a semantic theory and epistemology centered on drawing distinctions (biàn 辯) between the similar and dissimilar kinds of things that do or do not fall within the extension of ‘names’ (míng 名). The paper presents two novel interpretive hypotheses. First, for pre-Hàn Chinese thinkers, the functional role associated with the logical copula is filled by a general notion of similarity or sameness (tóng 同). Second, these thinkers’ basic explanation of reasoning is that it is a process of moving from a comparison of whether something is similar