Logic and Language, Volume 7, Part 1, of Science and Civilisation in China (review)

This latest volume in the monumental series Science and Civilisation in China is singular. Unlike its companion volumes, it treats not the history of science but the comparative history of the foundations of science in language and logic. It appears after many setbacks. Originally conceived by Janusz Chmielewski of Warsaw University, it was transferred to Christoph Harbsmeier in 1983. It was completed in 1989, shortly after the death of Harbsmeier's close collaborator A. C. Graham, to whom the book is dedicated, and whose influence is felt throughout. Joseph Needham's direct supervision of the series continued until his death in 1995, at which time volume 6, part 3 was in press.

Unlike at least some topics in other volumes, the very subject of language and logic presents a difficult terrain through which there is no one clear route. How closely should the study be linked to a diachronic narrative of the history of science in China and elsewhere? How comparative should it be? How, if at all, should it address such corollary topics as rationality, informal and mathematical reasoning, debate, argumentation and rhetoric, and precision and quantification? No approach to so amoeboid a subject matter will please all readers. Harbsmeier's choices would appear to follow from the work and interests of both himself and his collaborators.

The volume begins with a brief treatment of methodology. Harbsmeier examines the value of language and logic as objects of study within the Chinese tradition, as well as the history of the study of Chinese language and logic in the West. The second section of the book examines the Chinese language: spoken Chinese, the syntax of Chinese characters, traditional Chinese comments on language, the "art of definition," grammar, and literacy, including a very interesting comparison of Chinese dictionaries and those of Indian languages. The remainder of the book is an extensive treatment of Chinese logic in five areas: the logical features of Classical Chinese, logical concepts in Classical Chinese thought, logical practice, theories of logic in early China, and Chinese Buddhist logic.

Logical Features of Classical Chinese

Harbsmeier first examines features of Classical Chinese that have implications for logic (especially negation), logical sentence connectives, and quantifiers. He proceeds to lexical and grammatical categories and issues of logical and grammatical explicitness and complexity. This section is clearly indebted to Harbsmeier's earlier Aspects of Classical Chinese Syntax, but moves considerably beyond the scope of that work.¹ He begins by challenging Wilhelm von Humboldt's (1767-1835) claim that there was a correlation between the morphological complexity of a language and its ability to articulate complex syntactic structures:

Grammar, more than any other aspect of language, is contained invisibly in the modes of thinking of a speaker.²

Thinking is not merely dependent on language in general, but, up to a certain degree, on each specific language. People have wished, to be sure, to replace the words of the various languages by universally valid signs, as lines, numbers and algebraic symbols serve in mathematics. … All attempts to cancel out the many unique signs for eye and ear and replace them with a few general ones are but methods of abbreviated translation. It would be folly and delusion to imagine that such methods might transport one beyond the circumscribed limits of one's own language.³

Harbsmeier argues that grammatical (rather than morphological) complexity is the important concomitant to scientific reasoning and logical complexity, and that such complexity is found in Classical Chinese. He addresses three test cases: quantification (the use of words such as all, no, some, and only), logical connectives (especially the logically disjunctive "or"), and syntax (nested, self-embedded, and left- and right-branching constructions). His examples show that among these, only nesting and non-coordinate or right-branching constructions are difficult to make in Classical Chinese.

This discussion also introduces the very...