POSTSCRIPT 20171

Yang Xiao

I am grateful to Bo Mou, the editor of this anthology, for giving me an opportunity to provide a

postscript to my 2006 essay “Reading the Analects with Davidson: Mood, Force, and

Communicative Practice in Early China”, which is included in this anthology.2 The essay is part

of a larger project started in the 1990s when I became interested in a set of intriguing and

difficult issues at the intersections of several sub-fields of philosophy: ethics, philosophy of

language, philosophy of action, and Chinese philosophy. Many years have passed since then; I

have continued to think and write about these issues; parts of the recent thinking can be found in

several essays and a forthcoming book. I must confess that I have not changed my mind with

regard to the basic ideas and arguments in the 2006 essay. However, with the benefit of

hindsight, I now do see more clearly several blind spots and gaps that I was not aware of at the

time, e.g., how the targets of the arguments might have been more clearly distinguished and

more specifically defined (and given different treatments), which can indicate more clearly the

limits of various arguments. I also regret that I had not said more about the bigger picture of the

project, against which the 2006 essay could be better understood. These factors, I assume, must

have been exactly the reasons why I have continued to think and write about these issues. Hence

1
I dedicate this postscript to the memory of Jiyuan Yu 余紀元 (1964-2016). I shall always remember the long
conversation we had at the backyard of the house of our mutual friend Nick Bunnin in Oxford in 2006. I believe that
was the first time I met Jiyuan, although I had been an admirer of his work long before that. Some of the things we
talked about happened to be at the heart of this postscript. I remember that we talked about his review of Robert
Wardy’s book Aristotle in China, which led us to linguistic relativism and the relation between language and
thought, as well as the influential essay he wrote in the 1990s on Aristotle’s ontology and the Greek word for being
(Jiyuan’s essay is included in Song 2002).
2
Xiao 2006.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 2

there is no reason to assume that this postscript written in 2017 would be my ‘last word’ on the

issues.

From the perspective of the ‘logic of justification’ (not necessarily the ‘logic of

discovery’), all of these other writings, some of which were written before 2006, can be said to

take the 2006 essay as the point of departure, and furthermore, they fill some of the gaps in the

essay. However, it is impossible to summarize them here; I think what might be the best for me

to do in this postscript is to address some questions people have often asked me about the 2006

essay, many of which point to misconceptions and misunderstanding of the essay, as well as the

blind spots and gaps in the essay. I shall mention the other writings when they are relevant and

helpful.

Here is a roadmap of the postscript. In Section 1, I give a brief summary of the main

argument of the 2006 essay, but with two modifications this time. First, I now divide what is

called the ‘grammatical approach’ in the 2006 essay into two sub-groups: the formalist and the

non-formalist grammatical approach, and I emphasize that my argument is only applicable to the

first sub-group. The second sub-group, the non-formalist grammatical approach, would need

different treatments (I offer some of them in Sections 3-5). Second, I now think that there is an

additional target that requires a different treatment. When several modern scholars (Zhang

Dongsun, Zhou Youguang, and Chad Hansen) try to explain the distinctive features of classical

Chinese thinkers’ philosophy of language in terms of their perception of the distinctive

grammatical features of classical Chinese, they need an additional assumption, which is that the

classical Chinese philosophers would be aware of, and struck by, the same perceived distinctive

grammatical features of classical Chinese, as these modern scholars are. I believe it is a

misconception that everyone always takes the grammatical approach all the time. The
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 3

grammatical approach might have been a uniquely modern invention. Here we also see another

reason why it is important to talk about the history of the grammatical approach in Section 2.

In Section 2, in order to correct several common misconceptions, I offer a bigger picture

of the grammatical approach, focusing on Zhang Dongsun, who is the first to have adopted this

style of inquiry in the 1930s in China. I give a very sketchy story of how Zhang’s grammatical

approach emerged as a reaction against the dominant intellectual culture in the early twentieth-

century. I show how Zhang’s approach is a better paradigm because it rejects several problematic

philosophical assumptions taken for granted in the dominant intellectual culture at the time. Of

course, Zhang also uncritically inherited some other problematic assumptions as well.

In the last part of the postscript (Sections 3-5), I say a few more words about how we might

respond to the non-formalist grammatical style of inquiry and the additional assumption I

mentioned in Section 1. I focus on only one sub-group of the style of inquiry, which is the argument

(made by Zhang Dongsun, Zhou Youguang and Chad Hanse) that classical Chinese thinkers do

not have the concepts of sentences, propositions, or beliefs. I show how the arguments against it

would have to be a combination of ‘empirical’, ‘interpretive’, and ‘philosophical’ arguments.

Let me start with questions about the main target of my arguments in the 2006 essay, namely the

‘grammatical approach’ to pragmatics (as I call it in the essay). It is a particular style of inquiry

or reasoning in the study of pragmatics (the study of people’s communicative practice): Instead

of study these people’s communicative practice directly, it starts with the following:
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 4

(P1) observations about the distinctive grammatical features of the language L spoken by a

community of people.3

It then draws the following:

(C1) substantive conclusions about the distinctive pragmatic features of these people’s

communicative practice.

This is the definition I give in the 2006 essay. I now would like to add two modifications

in terms of two distinctions. The first modification requires me to make a distinction between

formal and non-formal grammatical features. At the time when I wrote the 2006 essay, I was not

aware of the ambiguity of the phrase a ‘grammatical feature of a language L’. The word

‘grammatical’ in the phrase can be used in a narrow sense so that it only refers to ‘formal’

grammatical features, such as the fact that L is an inflectional language, which means that the

grammatical mood of any sentence in L can be indicated by the inflected form of its verb.

However, the word ‘grammatical’ in the phrase can also be used in a broad sense. Many people

would want to use the phrase a ‘grammatical feature of a language L’ to refer to a ‘non-formal’

or ‘substantive’ feature of L, such as the fact that L does not have predicate or that it has a

peculiar concept of mass-noun. This feature is ‘non-formal’ or ‘substantive’ in the sense that it

involves existence or non-existence of words or concepts.

Correspondingly, the grammatical approach should be divided into formalist and non-

formalist grammatical approach. I shall use the term ‘formalists’ to refer to people who have

adopted formalist grammatical approach. As we shall see, my arguments in the 2006 essay is

only applicable to the former (more of this later).

3
The ‘grammatical’ features here include both formal and non-formal grammatical features. More of this soon.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 5

The second modification is needed in order to deal with the fact that some scholars who

have adopted the grammatical approach (be they formalists or non-formalists) also assume that it

is a universal phenomenon that everyone else would always adopt the grammatical approach

when they look at people’s communicative practice. That is to say, these scholars assume that

everyone else (including the ancient Chinese thinkers, who are the subject of these scholars’

inquiry) would also be aware of, and struck by, the same distinctive grammatical features of their

language, as these scholars are.

These scholars would make the following additional premise:

(P2) The people who speak L are aware of (and are struck by) the distinctive grammatical features

of L observed and articulated in (P1).

This additional premise would enable these scholars to draw an additional conclusion:

(C2) From their observations about the distinctive grammatical features of L, the people who

speak L would draw substantive conclusions about the distinctive pragmatic features of their

communicative practice, which are part of their theory of language.

In the 2006 essay, I should have mentioned the inference from P2 to C2. However, I focus

on the inference from P1 to C1, and furthermore, I focus on only one of the formal grammatical

features of a sentence, namely the grammatical mood of a sentence, for example, whether a

sentence is ‘indicative’, ‘interrogative’, or ‘imperative’. In modern English, which is an

inflectional language, the mood of a sentence is often indicated by the inflected morphological

form of the verb in the sentence. When a speaker S utters a sentence p in a particular situation,

the illocutionary force (the pragmatic force) refers to what S is doing with p in that particular

situation. The key difference between ‘grammatical mood’ and ‘pragmatic force’ is that the

former is a feature of sentences, whereas the latter is a feature of a particular speaker’s

utterances of sentences in particular situations. In other words, the grammatical mood of a

YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 6

sentence p would remain the same when p is uttered by different speakers in different situations,

whereas the pragmatic force of the speakers’ utterances of p can vary from situation to situation,

and from speaker to speaker.

I hope this difference between mood and force would already give one enough reason to

conclude that it is very unlikely that there can be a strict correlation between mood and force,

between grammar and pragmatics. If one wants to put the point in a slogan, it would be: ‘we

cannot do pragmatics by doing grammar’. And, as I argue in the 2006 essay, this is the basic idea

in Davidson’s thesis of the autonomy of linguistic meaning. The main conclusion of the 2006

essay is that the formalist inference from P1 to C1 is not valid.4

I hope this brief summary of the main argument in the 2006 essay shows that my target

there is very specifically and narrowly defined: I am focusing on formalist inference from formal

features (such as grammatical mood) of a language to substantive pragmatic features of

communicative practice. In the 2006 essay, I mention two scholars, Alfred Bloom and Chad

Hansen, who are representatives of the grammatical style of inquiry. However, some people have

noticed that I do not discuss Hansen’s ‘mass-noun hypothesis’, which is what he is most famous

for, and has inspired many scholars to have started an on-going debate concerning the

hypothesis. There are indeed superficial similarities between the formalist style of reasoning and

Hansen’s reasoning regarding the mass-noun hypothesis: the latter also starts with distinctive

‘grammatical’ features of the classical Chinese, and then draws conclusions about distinctive

features of the classical Chinese thinkers’ theory of language. It is natural that people have asked

me whether my argument in the 2006 essay is applicable to Hansen’s argument for the mass-

4
I do not explicitly give additional arguments to show why the inference from P2 to C2 is also invalid. This will be
remedied in Sections 4-5 in this postscript.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 7

noun hypothesis. In light of the distinction between formalist and non-formalist grammatical

approach, the answer is obviously no.

Now since my argument based on Davidson’s thesis of the autonomy of linguistic

meaning is only applicable to the ‘formalist’ approach, the non-formalist approach must be

treated with different arguments. As we shall see, the non-formalist style of reasoning can be

further divided into two sub-groups, each of which should also be treated differently (more of

this in Sections 3). However, before I do that, I would like to provide a bigger picture of the

grammatical approach in Section 2. Several common misconceptions could have been avoided,

had I said a little bit more about the bigger picture of the grammatical approach.

I believe that it could be misleading for me to have mentioned in the 2006 essay only two

scholars as the representatives of the grammatical approach, Bloom and Hansen (both of whom

happen to be ‘Western’ scholars), without adding that they are by no means the only ones or the

first ones to have adopted the approach, and that it is not an approach adopted by only ‘Western’

scholars. What I should have said is that the grammatical approach is a popular approach among

modern scholars in both China and the West. There is indeed a global history of the grammatical

approach, and it is extremely complicated. Here let me just say a few words about a central

figure in the China side of the story, Zhang Dongsun 張東蓀 (1886-1973), one of the most

influential philosophers in the twentieth-century.

I have decided to focus on Zhang here for two reasons. First, Zhang is arguably the first

to have articulated the basic ideas of the grammatical approach in a series of journal articles
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 8

published in the 1930s (later included as five appendixes in a book published in 1940).5 He has

directly influenced many scholars (I shall give an example in Section 3), and in the case of

scholars who might not have been directly influenced by Zhang, many of their ideas and

arguments have been anticipated in Zhang’s writings in the 1930s. Second, a closer look at

Zhang shows that the grammatical approach emerged as a reaction against the dominant

intellectual culture of his time. It is a result of Zhang’s attempt to overcome several problematic

assumptions regarding language evolution and philosophy of history, taken for granted by his

contemporaries. In other words, when we put it in its historical context, we would recognize the

grammatical approach as a major improvement. Since I am quite critical of the grammatical

approach in the 2006 essay, this is an important correction to another potential misconception.

Zhang studied philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University in Japan from 1904 to 1911,

where he received his education in Western philosophy. When he came back to China, he

became one of the most important public intellectuals. In addition to being a major political force

in Chinese politics (pushing for constitutionalism and republicanism), he wrote several

introductory textbooks on philosophy, ethics, and the history of Western philosophy. Zhang’s

textbooks are very popular; many Chinese scholars have mentioned that they had received their

philosophical education by reading them.

Zhang is also one of the first modern Chinese philosophers to have constructed his own

philosophical system, which is a synthesis of various elements from Chinese and Western

philosophy. But here I shall focus on a series of journal articles published in the 1930s, in which

Zhang has articulated a ‘new’ approach in the study of Chinese philosophy and comparative

philosophy. He aims at explaining the differences between ‘Chinese philosophy’ and ‘Western

5
Zhang 1940, 147-237.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 9

philosophy’ in terms of the differences between the grammatical features of the Chinese

language (including its writing system or script) and those of the ancient Greek or modern

English. This is what he claims at the very beginning of his 1936 essay (included as Appendix 2

in Zhang 1940): “The goal of this essay is to point out the distinctive features of Chinese

philosophy. That is to say, to explain the distinctive features of Chinese thought. And the method

adopted is comparative or contrastive”.6

Compared to the dominant intellectual culture in his time, what is strikingly new is that

Zhang does not say which is better when he compares ‘Chinese philosophy’ and ‘Western

philosophy’. Nor does he say which is better when he compares the Chinese language and

ancient Greek or English. He describes how they are different, and explains why they are

different. That is to say, he offers descriptions and explanations without value judgments. In

many ways, Zhang can be said to be the first to be doing ‘comparative philosophy’ as we know it

today. As we shall see, this is what makes his approach different from the previously exiting

paradigm – namely, the ‘literary revolution’ movement, which is at the heart of the dominant

intellectual culture in his time, in which ‘comparative philosophy’ is done in a very different

manner.

Toward the end of the nineteenth-century and the turn of the twentieth-century, China

suffered a series of military defeats and humiliations. Many Chinese intellectuals blamed

‘Chinese culture’ and the Chinese language as the main cause of why China had become a

‘backward’ country. The ‘literary revolution’ movement, which aims at reforming or even

ultimately abolishing the Chinese culture and the Chinese language, is one of their most radical

and extreme reactions to the situation. One of the most extreme views of the movement is that

6
Zhang 1940, 157.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 10

China is a ‘backward’ country because Chinese is a ‘backward’ language, which, furthermore, is

due to the fact that it is not a ‘phonetic’ language. Therefore, Chinese should be abolished, and

replaced with an alphabet-based, inflectional, ‘phonetic’ language.

Here let me single out a group of Chinese intellectuals who believe that Chinese should

be replaced by Esperanto, the artificial language invented by a Polish doctor. Many of them are

Chinese students in France and Japan. They believe in both ‘shijieyu zhuyi 世界語主義’ (which

literal means cosmopolitan-language-ism) and anarchism, which they believe is a

cosmopolitanism (shijie zhuyi 世界主義).7 These two identities of theirs go hand in hand. This is

why they deliberatively translated ‘Esperanto’ as ‘shijieyu 世界語’ (which literally means world

language or cosmopolitan language) or ‘wanguo xinyu 萬國新語’ (the new language for all the

countries), which reflected two of their deeply held beliefs, the first being their political belief

that anarchism is a cosmopolitanist world order that transcends nation-states and nationalism,

and the second being their ‘progressive philosophy of history’ belief that Esperanto will soon

become a universal language that enables humanity to overcome nationalism and get rid of

conflicts and wars caused by nationalism once for all.

It is not surprising that these scholars’ argument for replacing Chinese with Esperanto is

based on two sets of interconnected assumptions: the first set is (1a) the popular typology of

languages, combined with (1b) a teleological and progressive theory of language evolution. The

second set is (2a) anarchist political philosophy, combined with (2b) a teleological and

progressive philosophy of world history. This is the outline of their argument for their claim that

Chinese should be replaced with Esperanto: Chinese is an ‘ideographic’ language (according to

7
There was an attempt to revive the Esperanto movement in China since the 1980s. However, very few people in
China today are aware of its connection to anarchism, partly because the promoters do not want to bring attention to
the connection for political reasons.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 11

[1a]), which means that it is a ‘backward’ language (or ‘barbarian’, as one Chinese anarchist

once put it), and it will necessarily progress, sooner or later, to its next higher stage, which is to

become an alphabet-based or ‘phonetic’ language (according to [1b]). However, since the world

history is marching towards a higher and better stage, namely a world-community, in which

nation-states (together with national languages) will soon become obsolete (according to [2a] and

[2b]), Chinese should be replaced by a universal language, such as Esperanto.

Now we can see clearly that what is new in Zhang Dongsun’s approach is that although

he still accepts (1a), he rejects (1b), (2a), and (2b). For example, in the 1936 essay (included as

Appendix 2 in Zhang 1940), he takes pains to emphasize that “I believe that Chinese language

and foreign languages are simply different grammatically, and it does not mean at all whether

one is more evolved or not. They are simply different.”8 In other words, although he still accepts

the old orientalist description about the nature of the Chinese language, he rejects its evaluative

parts. He is interested only in describing and explaining the differences between Chinese

philosophy and Western philosophy in terms of the grammatical differences of the languages,

without making any value judgements about either the philosophies or the languages. It is

extremely interesting to note that Zhang would disagree with some Chinese scholars today who

also accept the old orientalist description about the nature of the Chinese language, but reverse

the old orientalist value judgment – they now claim that Chinese, being an ideographic language,

is better, which means that the Chinese way of thinking is also better. This seems to be a perfect

example of what might be called ‘reverse orientalism’.

In many ways, Zhang is ahead of not only his time but also our time. I believe one of the

main reasons why Zhang has been rediscovered and championed in China only recently is

8
Zhang 1940, 159.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 12

exactly because (1b), (2a), and (2b) have largely been discredited only recently.9 In other words,

we no longer believe that there is an evolutionary hierarchy of languages with Chinese at a lower

stage and inflectional languages at a higher stage, nor do we believe that an artificial language

such as Esperanto can become a genuine language in the first place. More importantly, most of

the people now believe that linguistic diversity, like biodiversity, is a good thing and all natural

languages are intrinsically valuable in and of themselves, and should be preserved.

However, it is important to emphasize that there are also other assumptions in his

approach that Zhang has uncritically inherited from the dominant intellectual culture in his time.

For example, he still accepts (1a), which is the dominant typology of languages in his time.

Many elements in it have been discredited. For example, the current consensus among scholars

who study writing systems is that classical Chinese should not be classified as an ‘ideographic’

language, rather it is something that cannot be located or characterized within the old topology.

If we have to use the old terminology to describe it, it is something that is between a pure

‘ideographic’ and a pure ‘phonetic language’.

Another problematic aspect of Zhang’s approach is that he has inherited the tendency to

make sweeping generalizations about the ‘Chinese’ way of thinking versus the ‘Western’ way of

thinking, each of which is imagined to be the timeless and unchanging essence of ‘Chinese

culture’ or ‘Western culture’. This tendency should not come as a surprise, perhaps, if we

recognize that it is a necessary consequence of adopting the grammatical style of reasoning.10 If

one indeed believes that the grammatical features of a language, which are timeless and

9
Many of Zhang Dongsun’s books have been republished, and collections of his writings have been edited and
published. There have also been scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and academic papers on many aspects of his
philosophy. I mention one example in Section 3.
10
It might be more accurate to say that it is a necessary consequence of adopting the grammatical approach and a
particular understanding of grammatical features as being timeless and unchanging. More of this later.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 13

unchanging, determine the substantive communicative practice of the speakers of that language,

then one would necessarily believe that there are timeless and unchanging substantive features of

the communicative practice of these speakers.

I believe we should study various communicative practices of various people in the long

history of China. But we should study these practices themselves directly. And if we do so, we

would eventually come to see and appreciate the diversity of these practices. For example, if we

study directly the communicative and hermeneutic practices in the long history of the commentary

tradition on the Analects, which has been an on-going project of mine since the 1990s, we would

discover that there have been at least two conflicting and competing paradigmatic ways of textual

understanding in the long history of the commentary tradition in China, one focusing on literal

meanings of sentences, in isolation from any contexts, and the other taking external and contextual

factors into account, in addition to literal meanings. 11 The diversity and variety of people’s

communicative practices in the history of China, I believe, might be one of the strongest pieces

of evidence to indicate that they cannot all be caused by the same timeless and unchanging

grammatical features of the Chinese language.

Or, perhaps, a better way to make the point is to say that the grammatical features of the

Chinese language are not ‘timeless’ or ‘unchanging’ (see some examples I give in the 2006 essay),

and the reason why this is the case is exactly because of the fact that people’s communicative

practices change. Furthermore, when we try to give an account of how and why these grammatical

changes take place, we will have to take into account the changes of the communicative practices

(the pragmatic changes). Making use of the theory of grammaticalization in modern linguistics,

some linguistic historians of Chinese have tried to give exactly such an account of grammatical

11
See Xiao 2007 and Xiao 2005-6.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 14

changes in terms of the ‘grammaticalization’ of pragmatic changes. One fascinating result is their

theory of particles or ‘empty words’ (xuci 虛詞) in terms of grammaticalization of pragmatics.

I have said that the 2006 essay deals with only the formalist grammatical style of inquiry. In

Sections 3-4, let me say a few more words about the non-formalist grammatical approach. There

is a famous example of a non-formalist grammatical style of inquiry in Zhang’s 1936 essay.

Zhang starts with an observation about a non-formal difference between classical Chinese and

several ‘Western’ languages, which is that there is no predicate in classical Chinese – no word in

classical Chinese can be readily translated as ‘to be’. Zhang then concludes that this is why one

can find ‘cosmology’ (the study of the cosmos), but not ‘ontology’ (the study of being) in

classical Chinese philosophy. This line of non-formalist inquiry has eventually inspired many

scholars to start a debate that is still going on today. An edited anthology of selected papers

published in China in 2002 includes about fifty papers, including Zhang’s 1936 essay and the

Chinese translation of A.C. Graham’s famous essay “The Relation of Chinese Thought to

Chinese Language” (Appendix 2 in Graham 1989).12

Now it must be pointed out that this is only one of several different kinds of non-

formalist reasonings in Zhang’s 1936 essay. For our purpose here, we might want to divide the

non-formalist style of reasoning into two sub-groups in terms of their conclusions. What we have

just mentioned above is a reasoning that ends up with the conclusion that there is no ‘ontology’

12
There is also a debate in the English scholarship; see
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 15

in the sense of ‘the study of being’ in classical Chinese philosophy. I believe that the issue is an

extremely complicated one and I shall have nothing further to say about it here.

However, from the observation that there is no predicate in classical Chinese, Zhang also

draws a different kind of conclusion, which is that the classical Chinese thinkers have no concept

of proposition. Now this is a completely different kind of non-formalist style of reasoning, and

unlike the first kind, it can be shown to be invalid. This is Zhang’s reasoning:

Because of the ‘peculiarity’ of the Chinese language, it is difficult [for the classical Chinese

thinkers] to construct ‘standard form of logical proposition’. Now since the basic unit in logic is

propositions, and if they do not have ‘typical proposition’, it would be difficult [for the classical

Chinese thinkers] to have logical inference. The so-called ‘standard form’ obviously depends on a

subject and a predicate, and the so-called ‘copula’ plays an essential role as well. One cannot

express predicate without copula. In English, the predicate is ‘is’, namely the verb ‘to be’, which

is the word ‘shi’ in vernacular Chinese. However, I have discovered that with the exception of the

word ‘shi’ in vernacular Chinese, there is no word in classical Chinese that is the equivalent of ‘to

be’ in English.13

Zhang gives a sentence as an example here, which is ‘yi zhe yi ye 義者宜也’. Most of the

scholars would translate it as Justice is appropriateness. However, Zhang refuses to provide a

translation. I believe that if he had to give an English translation it would have to be something

like Justice appropriateness or Justice [is] appropriateness. The reason he would refuse to put

‘is’ in the English translation is because, as he insists in the passage cited above, there is no word

in classical Chinese that is the equivalent of “is” in English. Furthermore, Zhang argues that the

formula used in the original Chinese sentence, ‘… zhe 者 … ye 也’ cannot turn the sentence into

13
Zhang 1940, 167. The English phrases ‘peculiarity’, ‘standard form of logical proposition’, typical proposition’,
‘copula’, ‘is’ and ‘to be’ in this passage are used by Zhang himself.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 16

a ‘logical proposition’ because, as he insists, the two words ‘zhe’ and ‘ye’ here are particles that

have no substantive meaning. Therefore, they cannot be the functional equivalent of ‘is’ which

has substantive meaning.14 I shall come back to this last part of Zhang’s argument in Section 5.

Since Zhang published this essay in 1936, this particular type of argument has become

rather popular. I shall mention variations of it in two scholars here. One is Zhou Youguang 周有

光 (1906-2017) and the other is Chad Hansen. As we shall see soon, Zhou’s example of ‘shan da

山高’, which he translates as Mountain big, and Hansen’s example of ‘bai ma ye 白馬也’, which

he translates as [It is] white horse, are both variations of Zhang’s example.

Zhou Youguang is often referred to as the “father of the pinyin”. He was appointed by the

Chinese government to be the head of the PRC Committee on Chinese Language Reform in the

1950s that designed the pinyin, the romanization system to represent the pronunciation of

Chinese characters, which is now used throughout the world. In an important sense, Zhou is

arguably the most influential and most famous linguist in China. It also helped that he lived a

long life (he died in 2017 when he was 111 years old). Zhou was educated at St. John’s

University in Shanghai (an Anglican university founded by American missionaries in 1879), and

he later lived in New York and London when he was stationed overseas by the Chinese

government. As we shall see, it is important to keep in mind this fact about his education and life

experience because it means that he was able to look at Chinese through, and in contrast with,

English. Zhou was trained as an economist, but he eventually became an amateur linguist of

Chinese and a comparative linguist. In addition to his committee work on the pinyin, he has

written many books on the Chinese language and script, as well as languages and scripts around

the world.

14
Zhang 1940, 168.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 17

I shall cite one passage from Zhou and divide it into two parts, corresponding to the

structure of the grammatical style of reasoning. Zhou starts with the following observation about

certain striking grammatical features of the Chinese language, when it is compared with English:

The English sentence must have a subject and a predicate. […] On the other hand, neither subject

nor predicate is required in a Chinese sentence, although they may often be found. […]

Furthermore, a Chinese sentence need not have verb. “Mountain big” is a sentence. It is not

necessary to use the verb “to be.” In fact, [the Chinese equivalent of] the verb “to be” does not

exist in classical Chinese.15

Zhou then draws the following conclusion about the pragmatic features of the communicative

(logical, scientific, and philosophical) practices in China:

Without the subject-predicate pattern in sentence structure, the Chinese did not develop the idea

of the law of identity in logic or the concept of substance in philosophy. And without these

concepts, there could not be idea of causality or science. (ibid., 603).

Let me now turn to Hansen, who starts with a similar observation, which is that in

English “a ‘complete sentence must be a complex of subject and predicate (terms and

predicates),”16 whereas in classical Chinese “one graph (a one-place verb or an adjective) can

constitute a Chinese ‘sentence’ (free standing utterance)”.17 Hansen also mentions other

distinctive grammatical features of classical Chinese, especially the fact that there are no

15
Zhou 1973, 601-2. The original Chinese sentence Zhou translates as “Mountain big” could be “shan da” or “shan
da ye”. It is likely the former because one can find the following sentence in the Erya 爾雅 (one of the first
dictionaries in ancient China): “shan da er gao” (the mountain is big and high). This is the full sentence in which it
appears: “A mountain will be described as song when the mountain is big and high” and the next sentence is about
what word to use to describe a mountain that is small and high.
16
Hansen 1985, 497.
17
Hansen 1985, 498. It is peculiar that they both make the strong claim that an English sentence ‘must’ have a
subject and a predicate. They seem not aware of countless counter-examples, such as “Janet! Donkeys!” in
Dickens’s novel David Copperfield, or the lists of one-word sentences in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations. I believe what Zhang, Zhou, and Hansen meant to say is that indicative sentences in English must
have a subject and a predicate. But it is a well-known fact that not all English sentences take the subject-predicate
form.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 18

grammatical markings of sentencehood because of the lack of inflections in classical Chinese.

Hansen then draws the conclusion that the ancient Chinese thinkers have no concepts of

sentence, proposition, or belief.18

Of course, as we have pointed out in Section 1, Hansen’s argument here requires an

additional premise, which is that the classical Chinese thinkers must have also been aware of,

and struck by, these distinctive features, as Hanse is. There is at least one moment in his

writings, Hansen seems to be very clear about this additional premise. He explicitly says that his

claim is not that there are no Chinese sentences, but rather the claim that the ancient Chinese

thinkers do not see sentences:

There are Chinese sentences, but ancient Chinese philosophical writers did not theoretically

distinguish between sentences and other meaningful strings of characters. A sentence in classical

Chinese may freely omit terms that precede the main verb – both subject terms and instrumental

terms. Thus a free-standing string or expression that we interpret sententially frequently consists

of only predicate or verb phrase.19

Let me now turn to this additional premise.

Zhang Dongsun, Zhou Youguang, and Hansen are modern scholars who are familiar with both

classical Chinese and English, and they find certain grammatical features of classical Chinese to

18
These reasons can also be found in Zhang’s 1930s writings. It is possible that Hansen could have been directly
influenced by Zhang. In his book Language and Logic in Ancient China, Hansen has cited Zhang’s 1939 essay,
“Sixiang, yanyu yu wenhua 思想言語與文化” (Thought, Language, and Culture), which is included as Appendix 3
in Zhang 1940,18 and it contains ideas and arguments that can also be found in Zhang’s 1936 essay (Appendix 2 in
Zhang 1940).
19
Hansen 1985, 496.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 19

be strange and exotic. However, can the same be said about the classical Chinese thinkers, who

do not know English? Would they find these features to be strange and exotic as well? All of the

three scholars would say yes. I have three responses here. I discuss the first two in the rest of this

section, and the third in the next section.

My first response is really a reformulation of my arguments in the 2006 essay, which is

that Hansen’s reasoning can be shown to be based on a flawed reasoning, which, as we shall see,

is what is called the ‘fallacy of denying the antecedent’. Let us take a closer look at Hansen’s

argument. In order to get a clearer view of the structure of his argument, I shall use labels to refer

to various parts of the argument.

The first premise of his argument is the following:

Since (p) an English speaker has grammatical markings (inflections – namely morphological

changes of words) to distinguish names from other word classes, then (q) an English speaker

would reject the view that all words are names.20

The second premise of his reasoning is the following:

(not p) A classical Chinese speaker has no grammatical markings (inflections) to distinguish

names from other word classes.

From these two premises, he concludes:

(not q) A classical Chinese speaker would not reject the view that all words are names.

As we can see clearly, Hansen’s argument is a textbook example of the fallacy of denying the

antecedent: from (if p then q) and (not p), he derives (not q). This is basically my arguments in

the 2006 essay, although I do not use the label. Since then I have eventually discovered that the

20
This is just a reformulation of Hansen’s following statement: “the syntactical grounds an English speaker would
give for distinguishing names from other word classes and for rejecting the view that all words are names” (Hansen
1985, 498).
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 20

fallacy of denying the antecedent is, not surprisingly, the most frequently made mistake among

scholars of Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy.

Here it might be helpful to recall the well-known saying that ‘there is more than one road

to Rome’. That is to say, if p is a road to q, it does not necessarily imply that p is the only road to

q. Therefore, when p is not available, it does not necessarily imply that there cannot be other

roads leading to q. In other words, inflection is not the only way to mark names from other word

classes or to indicate the moods of sentences. As I have argued in the 2006 essay, particles can

play a similar role sometimes.

However, what about sentences that do not contain particles? In classical Chinese texts,

there are simply too many sentences of this kind. The answer is that traditional Chinese

commentators usually take into account external and contextual factors to make judgments about

what a speaker is doing with a sentence, just as any speakers of any languages would do.21

Let me now turn to my second response to Hansen’s argument. I believe that there is no

simple and straightforward ‘empirical’ argument refuting Hansen, as some scholars have

believed. For example, one might believe that Hansen has already been refuted by Christoph

Harbsmeier’s empirical textual-evidence-based argument, and that it is a knock-down argument

refuting Hansen once for all.

Harbsmeier has found sentences in some classical Chinese texts that can be literally

translated as “A believed that p”, and he then presented them as textual evidence to show that the

classical Chinese writers do have the concept of sentences as well as the concept of beliefs.22 It

seems to me that Hansen could protect his view by softening it. He could respond to

Harbsmeier’s argument by saying that his thesis is not the stronger claim that none of ancient

21
For more detailed arguments, see Xiao 2005-6 and Xiao 2007.
22
Harbsmeier 1989.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 21

Chinese philosophical writers has the concept of sentences or beliefs. Rather his thesis is the

weaker claim that some of these writers do not have the concept of sentences. Hansen could

dismiss these counter-examples by saying that they are taken from texts not written by these

writers. As far as I know, Hansen has never responded to Harbsmeier’s critique. Would he

respond in the way I have suggested here? It seems that he would not because he continues to

make the stronger claim in all of his writings. However, whether Hansen actually has responded

in this way is not important. What matters is that he could have. In other words, Harbsmeier’s

empirical or textual-evidence-based argument cannot be a knock-down argument against

Hansen’s weaker thesis.

If we are looking for successful arguments against Hansen’s thesis, it might be helpful to

know what they might look like. As we shall see in the next section, they should be a

combination of ‘empirical’, ‘interpretative’, and ‘philosophical’ arguments.

Note that it is when it is compared with the grammatical features of English that certain

grammatical features of classical Chinese appear to be strikingly strange and exotic. To illustrate

this point, I shall make use of an interesting example from a New York Times article about how

Arabic is taught to American soldiers in a video game developed at University of Southern

California. One of the instructive screens is as follows:

Learn to introduce yourself.

In Arabic, the verbs ‘am,’ ‘are,’ ‘is’ are not used. For example, in English we say, My name is

John whereas in Arabic they say My name John.

‘esm name
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 22

‘esme my name

‘esme djon my name is John23

I believe it is understandable, at this early stage at least, if John, who is a beginner, has the

following reasoning: since in English we say ‘My name is John’ whereas in Arabic they say ‘My

name John’, therefore, there are no sentences in Arabic, and there are only strings of names. I

shall call this the “beginner’s grammatical approach”. This is an entirely legitimate approach for

beginners, and it is something many of us would do when we just start learning a foreign

language. However, one will eventually cease to be a beginner, and as one eventually masters

this foreign language, one will, and should, cease to take English grammar as the only way to

produce or conceptualize sentences. It is a good sign when John eventually stops thinking that

‘esme djon’ means ‘My name John,’ but rather it literally means ‘My name is John.’ John now

should also become skeptical of his earlier ‘theory’ that Arabic speakers do not have sentences

because they do not use predicates that can be readily translated into English words such as

“am,” “are,” and “is.”

In other words, John would realize that a foreign language can express sentences without

having the same grammatical features he finds in English. To learn a new language is to lean

new pragmatic ways to do similar things with new words. There is more than one road to Rome.

He would come to see his earlier reasoning as based on the fallacy of denying the antecedent. He

now can be said to have finally got a sense of the distinction between grammar and pragmatics.

Grammatically, ‘esme djon’ and ‘My name is John’ are very different, but pragmatically, they

communicate the same thought (what one’s name is), and is being used to do the same thing

(introducing oneself). He is now able to communicate that thought in Arabic and accomplish the

23
The New York Times, July 6, 2004.
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 23

act of self-introduction. He is also able to understands what is going on and what others are

doing when he hears the locals uttering the same sentence. When John reaches this stage, we

may say that John has overcome his ‘beginner’s grammatical approach’; he now has finally

acquired a ‘pragmatic’ approach to language.

Let us imagine that John has mastered Arabic and become a scholar, studying the

communicative practices of Arabic speakers. We can expect him to take a pragmatic approach,

which is the native Arabic speakers’ approach, rather than the grammatical one, which is his

earlier approach when he just started learning the language. John at this point should remind us

of Hansen, who obviously has mastered the Chinese language. As we have seen in one of the

passages cited earlier, at one point, he acknowledges explicitly that there are sentences in

classical Chinese texts, as far as he is concerned. However, he somehow assumes a very unlikely

scenario in which ancient Chinese philosophical writers, at least some of them, who are native

speakers, somehow would see the classical Chinese language as if they were beginners. They see

classical Chinese sentences in the same way in which John sees Arabic sentences when he is a

beginner.

We have a good explanation about why a native English speaker, who just starts learning

Arabic ort classical Chinese, would immediately notice those grammatical features as strikingly

strange and exotic (because they would certainly strike any beginner as exotic and strange). We

understand perfectly why they would see a string of names when we see classical Chinese

sentences. We also have a good explanation about why scholars such as Zhang, Zhou, and

Hansen, who are familiar with both English and classical Chinese, would find those grammatical

features to be strange and exotic. But we seem to have no good explanation for the scenario

involving the ancient Chinese philosophical writers.

YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 24

Of course, we must be careful not to committee the fallacy of denying the antecedent

here. The first two scenarios (John’s beginner’s approach, Zhang, Zhou, and Hansen’s bilingual

comparative approach) are not necessarily the only ways for one to come to see grammatical

features of a language as strange and exotic. It is possible that some philosophers simply have

the capacity to see what most of us take for granted as strange and exotic. Some of

Wittgenstein’s students and friends have observed that Wittgenstein has the rare capacity to see

the world as if he were seeing it for the first time.

What we need here is ultimately a philosophical argument that can place some limits on

our interpretations of classical Chinese philosophical writers’ sentences. Hansen might want to

interpret certain sentence of theirs as meaning that ‘all words are names’. And that is just their

strange and exotic way of seeing things. What we need here would then be an interpretive

argument combined with a philosophical one. It goes something like this. There might be no

textual or logical reasons not to translate a Chinese sentence so that it ends up meaning that “all

words are names”. But there might be philosophical reasons not to do so. In fact, there are indeed

good philosophical reasons not to interpret and translate the Chinese word ming 名 always as

‘names’ (in the sense of the term that ‘Socrates’ is a name and ‘is wise’ is not a name). Why is it

a bad translation when ming is always translated as ‘names’? Because it would lead to the

conclusion that some Chinese philosophical writers would have no concept of sentences, which

means that they would not be able to communicate with one another. For, as Davidson, inspired

by Frege, has argued, the basic unit of communication is sentences. If we go back to the

examples given by Zhang, Zhou, and Hansen, the point I am trying to make here is basically that

it is simply a bad and inaccurate translation to render the original Chinese sentence ‘yi zhe yi ye’

as Justice appropriateness, ‘shan da’ as Mountain big or the original Chinese sentence ‘bai ma
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 25

ye’ as A white horse. And as soon as we get the translations right, we can see clearly that the

Chinese speakers who utter these Chinese sentences are communicating thoughts expressed by

the sentences which literally means Justice is appropriateness, The mountain is big, or It is a

white horse.

REFERENCES

Graham, A. C. (1989), Disputers of the Tao (La Salle: Open Court).

Hansen, Chad (1985), “Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and ‘Truth’”, Journal of Asian

Studies 44.3: 491-519.

Harbsmeier, Christoph (1989), "Marginalia sino-logica", in Understanding the Chinese Mind:

The Philosophical Roots, edited by R. Allinson (London: Oxford University Press), 59-83.

Song, Jijie (2002), Being yu xifang zhexue zhuantong Being 與西方哲學傳統 (Being and the

Western Philosophical Tradition) (Baoding: Hebei University Press).

Wardy, Robert (2000), Aristotle in China: Language, Categories, and Translation (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press).

Xiao, Yang (2005-6), “The Pragmatic Turn: Articulating Communicative Practice in the

Analects”, Oriens Extremus 45: 235-254.

— (2006), “Reading the Analects with Davidson: Mood, Force, and Communicative Practice in

Early China”, in Davidson’s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement,

edited by Bo Mou (Leiden: Brill), 247-268.

— (2007), “How Confucius Does Things with Words: Two Paradigms of Hermeneutic Practice

in the Analects and Its Exegeses”, Journal of Asian Studies 66.2: 497-532.

Yu, Jiyuan (1995), “ya li shi duo de lun On” (亞理士多德論 On) (Aristotle on On), Zhexue
YANG XIAO: (2) POSTSCRIPT 26

yanjiu 4: 63-73.

— (1999), “The Language of Being: Between Aristotle and Chinese Philosophy”, International

Philosophical Quarterly 39.4: 439-454.

— (2001), review of Robert Wardy’s Aristotle in China, Mind 110.440: 1130-1133.

Zhang, Dongsun (1940), Zhishi yu wenhua 知識與文化 (Knowledge and Culture) (Shanghai:

Shangwu Publishing House).

Zhou, Youguang (1973), “The Chinese Language,” in An Introduction to Chinese Civilization,

edited by John Meskill (Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Company), 587-615.