Yang Xiao 萧阳

Kenyon College
浙大人文高研院 (驻防学者)
Fudan University, May 11, 2018
(Draft. Please do not cite or circulate.)

The Chinese Language and Chinese Philosophy:

Is There a Necessary Connection?1

Introduction

Answering the title question, some people have said: Yes, there is a necessary connection

between the Chinese language (漢語) and Chinese philosophy (中國哲學). They

sometimes formulate their thesis as follows:

(PT) Distinctive features of “Chinese philosophy”, or “the Chinese way of

thinking” (中國特有的思維方式), are determined by distinctive features of the
Chinese language.

I shall call this the “particular thesis” of linguistic relativism (PT).2 There are also a group

of people who claim that there is no “philosophy” or “Chinese philosophy” in ancient

1
I dedicate this chapter 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 chapter. I remember that we talked about his review of
Robert Wardy’s book Aristotle in China: Language, Categories, and Translation, which
led us to a long discussion about linguistic relativism and the issue of whether there is a
necessary connection 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
If one just looks at the literal meaning of the formulation, it is clear that it is more
accurate to call this view “linguistic determinism.” However, the view has been widely
known as “linguistic relativism.” I follow the popular usage here.

1
China because of certain distinctive features of the Chinese language. Fu Sinian 傅斯年

(1896-1950) might have been the first to have articulated one version of this view (more

of this later). In their formulation of the thesis, these people would use “the Chinese way

of thinking”, rather than “Chinese philosophy”.

PT is believed to be a particular implication of a more general thesis called

“linguistic relativism”, which is sometimes formulated as follows:

(GT) Distinctive features of the way of thinking of a community of speakers of a

language L are determined by distinctive features of L.

I shall call it the “general thesis” of linguistic relativism (GT). Obviously, PT is the

particular version of GT when L happens to be the Chinese language. When I use the

phrase “the thesis” in this chapter, I usually refer to PT.

For practical purposes and for the time being, we might say that people who

believe in PT belong to the “party of linguistic relativism”. Since the words and concepts,

in terms of which PT is defined, are vague (more of this later), the list of people who

belong to this party can be very long. Let me just mention some of them, who are the first

ones to have articulated this view: Zhang Dongsun 张东荪, Fu Sinian 傅斯年, Zhou

Youguang 周有光, Shen Xiaolong 申小龙，Yu Jiyuan 余纪元, A. C. Graham, Alfred

Bloom, Henry Rosemont, Roger Ames, David Hall, and Chad Hansen.

Recently, more and more scholars in China have come to embrace this position,

and some of them have suggested that the old term “zhongguo zhexue 中國哲學”

(Chinese philosophy) is too general, and should be replaced by a more specific term

“hanyu zhexue 漢語哲學” (Chinese-language philosophy) in order to reflect the Chinese

2
language’s decisive influence on Chinese philosophy.3 As one can imagine, since PT is

believed to be a particular implication of the general thesis of linguistic relativism, other

associated new terms would have to be coined as well. For example, the old term “德国

哲学” (German philosophy) should now be replaced by “德语哲学” (German-Language

philosophy).4 As I am writing in 2018, it seems that the new terms are in the process of

gradually replacing the old ones.

This also means that various sub-fields of Chinese philosophy should also be re-

named, and we would have new terms such as “hanyu xinling zhexue 漢語心靈哲學”

(Chinese-language philosophy of mind), and “hanyu yuyan zhexue 漢語語言哲學”

(Chinese-language philosophy of language). One example of the last sub-field is the

claim made by several scholars who are the main characters in our story (Zhang

Dongsun, Zhou Youguang, and Chad Hansen), which is that the early Chinese thinkers’

philosophy of language are determined by their perception of certain distinctive features

of the Chinese language. This will be a main target in this chapter.

There are also many people who reject PT completely. I shall call them the “party

of the deniers of linguistic relativism”. If we put their position in the form of a thesis, it

would be the negation of PT (or GT). PT is vague, so is its negation. Since we use its

3
See Liu 2015. This seems to be the first monograph on the subject. There have also
been many articles and conferences on the subject recently in China. Similarly, some
Chinese Christian theologians have coined the term “hanyu jidujiao shenxue 漢語基督教
神學” (Chinese-language Christian theology). There is a large body of literature on this. I
am not sure what I say here is applicable to this case. I shall not deal with it here.
4
A conference held in Taiwan in 2007 is called “The Interactions between Chinese-
Language Philosophy (汉语哲学) and German-Language Philosophy (德语哲学)”.

3
negation as the criterion of the party membership, it is not a surprise that people

belonging to this second party are also remarkably diverse. In fact, it is even more diverse

than the people in the first party. Now the question seems to be: Which party is right?

Whose thesis is true?

So far what we have done is that we have provided the formulations of two

conflicting theses in a major debate in philosophy. One might assume that, facing with

two conflicting theses in a philosophical debate, a philosopher’s job is to determine

which of them is true and offer arguments for one’s conclusion. This seems to be a

standard procedure followed by professional philosophers in most of the books and

journal articles in philosophy today. I shall have more to say about why we should not

adopt this procedure; here let me draw attention to the fact that people who belong to

either party are remarkably diverse. In fact, it is hard to see what they have in common

except that they can all be said to endorse (or reject) PT, which characterizes the criterion

of the party membership. It is largely due to the fact that PT is defined in terms of words

and concepts that are vague that such a wide range of people could all belong to the same

party. I believe our task here is not to jump into argumentations, but to look at each and

every one of the member’s specific claims closely and patiently. “Don’t think, but look!”,

as Wittgenstein once instructed. After we have narrowed down and sorted out these

specific claims, we would be able to see which ones are true, which ones are false, and

which ones are still to be settled. The debate on the level of PT and its negation would be

pointless and fruitless. In our case here, another useful instruction might be “Don’t argue,

but look!” or “Don’t debate, but look!”. Of course, in our current philosophical culture,

one is often tempted to first identify oneself in terms of certain ism (e.g., as an endorser

4
or a denier of linguistic relativism), and then try to argue for or against it. However, this

is a mistake. To jump into a debate right away in the beginning is to begin too late in

philosophy. One should begin earlier than that. One should be aware of, and be skeptical

of, the standard procedure and setting-up of a typical philosophical debate, as well as the

specific formulations of the terms of the debate. Nothing is as innocent as it seems.

We might want to pay special attention to a sub-group within the second party.

These are people who insist that there is no such a thing called hanyu zhexue 汉语哲学

(Chinese-language philosophy), even if there is such a thing called zhongguo zhexue 中国

哲学 (Chinese philosophy). In other words, these are people who acknowledge that there

are distinctive features of “Chinese philosophy”, and at the same time insist that none of

them are determined by (or can be explained in terms of) the distinctive features of the

Chinese language. I used to belong to this sub-group until I came to see that they are

ultimately wrong to use the word “none”, the strongest term possible, and that we should

be open-minded about the possibility that some distinctive features of Chinese philosophy

might be explained in terms of some distinctive features (including grammatical features)

of the Chinese language, and it all depends on what one means by “the Chinese

language” or “grammatical features”, which are remarkably vague terms.

However, these people in this sub-group have raised a good question: Why

language? Not everyone who reject linguistic relativism would necessarily reject the

possibility that Chinese philosophy might have distinctive features. What they reject is

that all of these features can only be explained in terms of the features of the Chinese

language. There can be so many other factors when one starts thinking about how to

5
explain why Chinese philosophy has the distinctive features it does: factors in history in

general (which also includes a lot of historical contingencies), politics, physical

environment, economic and social environment, the particular ways in which intellectual

discussions, communications, and debates are organized,5 or the particular ways in which

the network and community of philosophers are organized.6 Why should “language” be

the only decisive factor? I believe that the burden of proof is on those who promote

“hanyu zhexue 汉语哲学” (Chinese-language philosophy). In the rest of this chapter, I

shall assume that certain moderate and weaker versions of PT and its negation are

possible. I leave the details for others to fill in.

I think it is not a surprise, by now, to know that if I am asked which of the two

parties I belong to, I must say it is the third party of those people who would say that they

do not know what the thesis of linguistic relativism is. If one offers them the formulation

of the thesis I have just given earlier, PT or GT, their response would be that they do not

think they know the determinate meaning of the thesis because the keywords and key-

concepts in the thesis, such as “the Chinese language”, can have a wide range of

meanings. Whether the thesis is true, then, depends on how one interprets these words

and concepts. But belonging to the third party does not stop me from having some

5
This is the approach adopted by Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, see Lloyd and Sivin
2003. Of course, one does not have to agree with them (I myself do not agree with a lot
of details in their explanations). But they have raised a serious challenge to those who
promote the “Chinese-language philosophy” approach.
6
This is the approach adopted by Randall Collins, see Collins 1998. The book is a global
history, including a part dealing with Chinese philosophy. Again, one does not have to
agree with Collins to see that he has raised a challenge to those who promote the
“Chinese-language philosophy” approach.

6
sympathy with the other parties, and a wish to reconcile them. So it is likely to disappoint

everyone.

Nevertheless, this chapter is intended as a move towards reconciliation. More

specifically, the goal of reconciliation is achieved through “understanding through

history” and “clarification and argumentation”. Here is a road-map of this paper. In

Section 1, I shall tell a historical story about the (arguably) first two linguistic relativists

in China, Fu Sinian and Zhang Dongsun, with a focus on the later. I believe that to

understand how and why linguistic relativism first emerged in China might help us see

why it appears to be an attractive view to so many scholars today. In Sections 2-4, I offer

case studies of various specific theses made by scholars who practice what we today

would call “Chinese-language philosophy of language”. I show that in one case, the

thesis is still to be settled, and in the other case, the thesis is false and the reasoning is

invalid.7

1. Understanding Linguistic Relativism

In this section, I focus on Zhang Dongsun 张东荪, who might be one of the founders of

the “linguistic relativism” discourse in China. However, before I turn to Zhang, I would

like to say a few words about Fu Sinian 傅斯年, who had made some of the same points

Zhang made, and made them earlier than Zhang, although his ideas are not as influential

as Zhang’s among philosophers. In a well-known letter to Gu Jiegang in 1926 (made

7
This is a shortened version of the chapter; I have left out several other case studies.
There are cases in which the specific theses turn out to be true.

7
public when published in a journal), Fu claimed that Hu Shi 胡适, who wrote the first

history of Chinese philosophy, is wrong to have written a “history of philosophy” (zhexue

shi 哲学史), which includes Laozi, Confucius, and Mozi (Fu, 1/459). Fu immediately

made it very clear that he thinks that China’s not having had philosophy is a good thing:

“China originally did not have the so-called philosophy. Thank God for having given our

nation such a healthy habit” (Fu, 1/459). But he did not articulate what he meant by these

claims. In a later work, we can find more detailed remarks:

Philosophy is the by-produce of language, and Western philosophy is the by-

product of Indo-European languages. The Chinese language is not a language of
philosophy. The masters (zi 子) in the Warring-States period are not philosophers.
(Fu, 2/251).

He claims that three nations are most famous for their philosophy: Indian Aryans,

Greeks, and Germans. (For those who are familiar with German discourse on race,

cultural nationalism, and history of “Western” philosophy in the 1910s-20s, this is

obviously what he had picked up when he was studying in Germany in 1923-26).

According to Fu, the three nations have one thing in common, which is that when their

cultures were at the stage of being the most flourishing, their languages had not lost the

original sophisticated and complex forms of Indo-European languages. Since thought

cannot be separated from language, their thought was influenced by their languages

unconsciously (Fu, 2/251). Fu does not really offer details in his arguments. If he does

offer something that might be considered as an argument, it is something like this:

The most famous philosopher German nation has produced is Kant, whose most
famous book is 纯理评论. Isn’t this book full of German words through and
through? Could this book ever even be translated? […] Philosophy ought to be
logical thought, and logical thought should not be limited by any one particular
[national] language, and should be as easily translatable as mathematics. Or it
should not even need to be translated. However, this is not the case. [Kant’s book]
cannot be translated. Therefore, how could there be any doubt that these

8
 philosophies are determined (支配) by the languages that produced them. Take
the term Ding an Sich as an example. There cannot be a Chinese translation of it,
nor does it look like a [good] translation when it is translated into English. But in
German, an Sich is just an ordinary phrase, and this is why the term is not a
strange one in Kant. […] Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, when translated into
English, does not make sense (不像话), and if one tries to translate it into
Chinese, it cannot be done. (Fu, 2/252).

At one point, he seems to be saying that by his claim “Chinese is not a language of

philosophy”, he means that it is not rich in “abstract nouns”, and that it is not an

inflectional language, hence it has no grammatical complexities one can find in

inflectional languages (Fu, 2/252-3). He claims that the grammatical complexities in

inflectional languages are “the mother of ‘apparently serious’ philosophical analysis”

(Fu, 2/252).

It should be pointed out that Fu actually thinks that Chinese is the most evolved

language (Fu, 2/252-3), which means that he does not accept the dominant view in his

time that inflectional languages are the more evolved ones. As we shall see soon, he is in

agreement with Zhang Dongsun in this regard.

Zhang Dongsun 张东荪 (1886-1973) is one of the most influential philosophers

in the twentieth-century China. He certainly has had much more influence than Fu among

philosophers. I have decided to focus on Zhang here for two reasons. First, Zhang is

arguably the first to have articulated the basic ideas of linguistic relativism in a series of

journal articles published in the 1930s (later included as five appendixes in a book

published in 1940; see Zhang 1940, 147-237). He has directly influenced many scholars

(e.g., Chad Hansen), and in the case of scholars who might not have been directly

influenced by Zhang (e.g., A. C. Graham, Jiyuan Yu), many of their ideas and arguments

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

9
writings and their historical contexts shows that his linguistic relativism emerged as a

reaction against the dominant intellectual culture of his time. It is a result of Zhang’s

attempt to reject and overcome several problematic assumptions regarding language

evolution and philosophy of history, adopted and promoted by his contemporaries. In

other words, when we put it in its historical context, we would recognize Zhang’s

linguistic relativism as a major improvement.

Zhang Dongsun 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 academic philosopher. 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 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 which takes into account the Chinese language.

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

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

10
modern English. This is what he says 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. (Zhang 1940, 157)

Compared to the dominant intellectual culture in his time, what is strikingly new here 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 with ancient Greek or modern 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 文学革命’ 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 beginning 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 China is a ‘backward’ country because the

Chinese language is a ‘backward’ language. Lu Xun 鲁迅, one of the most influential

heroes of the literary revolution movement, once famously said, “If the Chinese language

11
were not to be abolished, China would necessarily perish” (汉语不灭, 中国必亡)”. Some

claims, furthermore, that the Chinese language is backward because it is not a ‘phonetic’

language. Therefore, it should be abolished, and replaced with an alphabet-based,

inflectional, ‘phonetic’ language.

Here let me single out a group of Chinese intellectuals, who are anarchists and

who also believe that the Chinese language 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 世界语主义’ (which literal means

cosmopolitan-language-ism) and anarchism (无政府主义, 安那其主义), which they

believe is a cosmopolitanism (shijie zhuyi 世界主义).8 These two identities of theirs go

hand in hand. This is why they deliberatively translated ‘Esperanto’ as ‘shijieyu 世界语’

(which literally means world language or cosmopolitan language) or ‘wanguo xinyu 万

国新语’ (new language for all the countries), which reflected their deeply held beliefs

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

nationalism, and that Esperanto will soon become a universal language which enables

humanity to overcome nationalism and get rid of conflicts and wars caused by

nationalism once for all.

We might want to articulate the details of the assumptions behind their arguments.

It can be shown that these scholars’ argument for replacing Chinese with Esperanto is

based on two sets of interconnected assumptions: the first set has two components:

8
There has been 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 and
cosmopolitanism, partly because the promoters since the 1980s do not want to bring
attention to the connection.

12
 (1a) the popular typology of languages,

(1b) a teleological and progressive theory of language evolution.

The second set also has two components:

(2a) an anarchist political philosophy,

(2b) a teleological and progressive philosophy of world history.

This is the outline of their argument for their claim that Chinese should be replaced by

Esperanto:

First, according to (1a), Chinese is an ‘ideographic’ language, which means that it

is a ‘backward’ language (or ‘barbarian’, as one Chinese anarchist once put it), and

according to (1b), it will necessarily progress, sooner or later, to its next higher stage,

which is to become an alphabet-based or ‘phonetic’ language. Second, according to [2a]

and [2b], 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, therefore, Chinese should (and would) 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. (Zhang 1940, 159)

In other words, although he still accepts the old orientalist description about the nature of

the Chinese language, Zhang rejects its evaluative parts. He is interested only in

describing and explaining the differences between Chinese philosophy and Western

13
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’.

To understand this phenomenon better, we might want to take into account the fact that

China today has become a major power, which means that scholars today have more self-

confidence to say positive things about things Chinese. However, it seems that there are

much more orientalist assumptions that have much deeper roots than people are aware of.

I believe one of the main reasons why Zhang has been rediscovered and

championed in China only recently is 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 (as an ideographic language) 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, let along

replacing other natural languages. 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.

9
Many of Zhang Dongsun’s books have been republished recently, and collections of his
writings have been edited and published recently as well. There have also been scholarly
monographs, edited volumes, and academic papers on many aspects of his philosophy.

14
 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’.

However, the myth that Chinese is an ideographic language is still being taken for

granted as a fact by many people who promote “Chinese-language philosophy”.

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 Zhang’s

adopting the grammatical style of reasoning.10 If one indeed believes that the

grammatical features of a language, which are timeless and 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.

10
I say more about the grammatical approach in the later sections. Here 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.

15
 I believe we should study various communicative practices of various people in the

long history of China. As I have argued elsewhere, following Donald Davidson, pragmatics

(the study of people’s communicative, linguistic, and hermeneutic practices) cannot be

done by doing grammar (Xiao 2006, 2005-6, 2007), and I shall have more to say about this

later in this chapter. We should study these practices themselves directly, not indirectly

(for example, through studying its grammar). 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 jingxue 经 学

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

(see Xiao 2007 and 2005-6). The diversity and variety of people’s communicative,

linguistic, and hermeneutic 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

Xiao 2006), 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

16
grammaticalization in modern linguistics, some linguistic historians of Chinese have tried

to give exactly such an account of grammatical changes in terms of the

‘grammaticalization’ of pragmatic changes. One fascinating result is their theory of

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

2. Linguistic Relativism as a Style of Explanation

I have been collecting various people’s claims that might be said to be various instances

of PT or its negation since the 1990s, and these people might be identified (sometimes

self-identified) as members of the first party, or of the second party. It has turned out to

be a large set of data, with extraordinarily diverse group of people making remarkably

different kinds of claims within either of the parties. What have I learned in this long

process of studying this large set of data? I want to say that I have gradually come to see

that, as I have said earlier in the introduction to this chapter, any debate between the two

parties on the level of PT or its negation, or any attempt to settle the debate on this level,

would be pointless and fruitless. One of the goals of this chapter is to get our hands dirty

in details: try to identify, narrow down, and sort out various specific claims, and show

which ones are true, which ones are false, and which ones are still to be settled.

These various claims belonging to the first party are radically different, and are

only loosely held together by a label (“linguistic relativism”), as well as by a thesis, PT,

which is vague and indeterminate, largely because the key term “the Chinese language” is

vague and indeterminate. In fact, PT only looks like a “thesis”. It is not really a genuine

thesis with a determinate content. How many determinate meanings one might give to the

17
key term “the Chinese language” in PT, how many genuine theses with determinate

meanings one would get, some of which, as we shall see, are true, some false, and some

still to be settled.

Perhaps one way to make sense of PT not being a genuine thesis is to say that what

it provides is really a program about a particular style of inquiry, reasoning, or

explanation, disguised as a theoretical thesis. Note that PT has the structure of “q is

determined by p”, in which q is a set of propositions about distinctive features of Chinese

philosophy, and p a set of propositions about distinctive features of the Chinese language.

One of the important implications of such a structure is that one can use it to give an

“explanation” of why Chinese philosophy has the distinctive features it does in terms of

distinctive features of the Chinese language. In other words, PT is more than a theoretical

thesis; it implies a particular style of inquiry or explanation that might take the following

form of reasoning: “p, therefore, q”. That is to say, p can be used to provide an

“explanation” of q. More specifically, distinctive features of “the Chinese language” can

be used to explain why “Chinese philosophy” has the distinctive features it does.

We are now in a good position to start examining each and every of people’s

specific claims when they are doing “Chinese-language philosophy” by looking at

whether their reasoning (“p, therefore, q”) is valid. Here p is a set of propositions about

distinctive features of the Chinese language, and q a set of propositions about distinctive

features of Chinese philosophy. The only assumption we need is that we should

understand “philosophy” as a kind of communicative, linguistic, and hermeneutic

practice that involves concepts and arguments. This assumption would enable us to make

18
use of Davidson’s accounts of communicative practices. In the rest of this chapter, I shall

focus on a style of explanation which I have called the ‘grammatical approach’ (Xiao

2006). 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 does it indirect. It starts with the following:

(p1) observations about the distinctive grammatical features of the language L

spoken by a community of people.

It then draws the following conclusion:

(q1) 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. I discuss the first modification in this section, the second

modification in the next section. 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 sometimes also 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.

19
 Correspondingly, the grammatical approach should be further divided into two

sub-groups: formalist and non-formalist grammatical approach. I shall use the term

‘formalists’ to refer to people who have adopted formalist grammatical approach. My

arguments in the 2006 essay is only applicable to formalists.

In the 2006 essay, 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 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

q1 is not valid.

20
 We are now in a good position to give an example of a specific thesis that is still

to be settled. Let me start with Zhang’s 1936 essay. Zhang makes an observation about a

“grammatical” 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. He is obviously practicing the particular style of explanation I just

mentioned: a distinctive feature of Chinese philosophy (namely, the absence of ontology)

is explained in terms of a distinctive non-formalist grammatical feature of the classical

Chinese (the absence of predicate).

This line of 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, Jiyuan Yu’s essay on Aristotle

on on, and the Chinese translation of A.C. Graham’s famous essay “The Relation of

Chinese Thought to Chinese Language” (Appendix 2 in Graham 1989).

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

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

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’ in the sense of ‘the study of being’ in classical Chinese philosophy. I believe

that whether the reasoning that ends up with this conclusion is valid and whether this

conclusion is true is an issue to be settled. It is an extremely complicated one, and I shall

have nothing further to say about it here.

21
 However, from the observation that there is no predicate in classical Chinese,

Zhang also draws a radically different kind of conclusion, which is that the classical

Chinese thinkers have no concept of proposition. Now this is a completely different kind

of style of reasoning, and unlike the first kind, it can be shown to be invalid. I deal with

this case in Sections 3-4.

3. An Invalid Mode of Reasoning in “Chinese-Language Philosophy of Language”

In this section, we examine the grammatical reasoning that concludes that there is no

concept of propositions in the philosophy of language in early China. This can be found

in the following three scholars: Zhang Dongsun, Zhou Youguang, and Chad Hansen. This

is a good example of what many scholars today would call “Chinese-language philosophy

of language”.

Zhang is the first to have offered such an explanation. Let us take a close look at

his 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 是’ 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.
(Zhang 1940, 167)11

11
The English phrases ‘peculiarity’, ‘standard form of logical proposition’, typical
proposition’, ‘copula’, ‘is’ and ‘to be’ in this passage are used by Zhang himself.

22
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 use ‘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 … ye …者…也’ cannot turn the sentence into a ‘logical proposition’

because, as he insists, the two words ‘zhe’ and ‘ye’ here are particles or xuci 虚词 (empty

words) that have no substantive meaning. Therefore, they cannot be the functional

equivalent of ‘is’ which has substantive meaning (Zhang 1940, 168). I shall come back to

this last part of Zhang’s argument later in Section 4.

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

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

Youguang (1906-2017) and the other is Chad Hansen. As we shall see soon, Zhou’s

example of ‘shan da 山大’, which he translates as Mountain big, and Hansen’s example

of ‘bai ma ye 白马也’, 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

23
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.

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
(Zhou 1973, 601-2).12

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

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

12
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 (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.

24
 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)”(Hansen 1985, 497), whereas in classical Chinese “one graph (a one-place

verb or an adjective) can constitute a Chinese ‘sentence’ (free standing

utterance)”(Hansen 1985, 498).13 Hansen also mentions other distinctive grammatical

features of classical Chinese, especially the fact that there are no 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.14 This is why Hansen feels compelled to translate “bai ma ye 白马

也” as “[It is] a white horse”, rather than simply “It is a white horse” (Hansen 1985, 498).

However, Hansen’s argument here requires an additional premise, the “projected

exoticness assumption” (as I shall call it), which is that the classical Chinese thinkers

must have also been aware of, and struck by, these distinctive features, as Hanse is. There

13
It is peculiar that all of the three scholars 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.
14
These reasons can also be found in Zhang’s 1930s writings. It is likely 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
语与文化” (Thought, Language, and Culture), which is included as Appendix 3 in Zhang
1940, and it contains ideas and arguments that can also be found in Zhang’s 1936 essay
(Appendix 2 in Zhang 1940).

25
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 believe that there are no 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. (Hansen 1985, 496)

I now offer several arguments against the “projected exoticness” assumption in the next

section.

4. The “Beginner of Arabic” Thought Experiment

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 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, and the last one is what I shall call the “Beginner of Arabic” thought

experiment.

My first response is really a reformulation of one 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

26
his argument, I shall use labels (‘p’ and ‘q’) 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.15
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 one of

my arguments in the 2006 essay, although I do not use the label there. Since then I have

eventually discovered that the 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

15
This is just a reformulation of Hansen’s idea when he talks about “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).

27
argued elsewhere, particles or xuci (empty words) can play a similar role sometimes

(Xiao 2006 and Xiao 2005-6).

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.16

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 (Harbsmeier 1989). 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 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 Harbsmeier’s 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

16
For more detailed arguments, see Xiao 2005-6 and Xiao 2007.

28
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 my third response, they

should be a combination of ‘empirical’, ‘interpretative’, and ‘philosophical’ arguments.

I start my third response with the observation that it is when it is compared with

the grammatical features of English, a foreign language, that certain grammatical features

of classical Chinese appear to be strange and exotic. Since many of us are familiar

(perhaps too familiar) with Chinese. It might be helpful to use Arabic as a thought

experiment. When John Searle gave a talk on his famous “Chinese Room” thought

experiment at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in the 1980s, he

(wisely, I believe) changed it into an “Arabic Room” thought experiment.

According to 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

‘esme my name

29
 ‘esme djon my name is John17

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 adult beginners would do when they 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

17
The New York Times, July 6, 2004.

30
able to communicate that thought in Arabic and accomplish the act of self-introduction.

He now would be able to use the one-word sentence, “John.”, to introduce himself. He is

also able to understand 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 or classical Chinese, would immediately notice those grammatical

features as strikingly strange and exotic (because they would certainly strike any adult

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

31
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.

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

32
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 义者宜也’ as Justice appropriateness, ‘shan da 山大’ as Mountain big, and the

original Chinese sentence ‘bai ma ye 白马也’ as [It is] 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, and It is a white horse.

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