Technically, the attitude was what philosophers a
de re attitude. The subject was in the world not in the mind. The context of use
picked out the intended item. The attitude consisted of projecting the mental
category or concept on the actual thing. We distinguish this functional role
best by talking about a disposition rather than a belief. It is a disposition to
assign some reality to a category. The requisite faculty of the heart-mind (or
the senses) is the ability to discriminate or distinguish T from not-T, e.g.,
good from bad, human being from thief. We might, alternately, think of Chinese
‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ as predicate attitudes rather than propositional
attitudes. Predicate attitudes are the heart-mind’s function.
A basic judgment
is, thus, neither a picture nor representation of some metaphysically complex
fact. Its essence is picking out what counts as ‘X’ in the situation (where ‘X’
is a term in the guiding discourse). The context fixes the object and the
heart-mind assigns it to a relevant category. Hence, Chinese folk theory places
a (learned or innate) ability to make distinctions correctly in following a dao
in the central place Western folk psychology places ideas. They implicitly
understood correctness as conformity to the social-historical norm. One of the
projects of some Chinese philosophers was trying to provide a natural or
objective ground of dao. Western ideas are analogous to mental pictographs in a
language of thought. The composite pictures formed out of these mental images
(beliefs) were the mental counterparts of facts. Truth was correspondence
between the picture and the fact. Pictures play a role in Chinese folk theory of
language but not of mind. Chinese understood their written characters as having
evolved from pictographs. They had scant reason to think of grammatical strings
of characters as pictures of anything. Chinese folk linguistics recognized that
history and community usage determined the reference of the characters. They did
not appeal to the pictographic quality or any associated mental image
individuals might have. Language and conventions are valuable because they store
inherited guidance. The social-historical tradition, not individual psychology,
grounds meaning. Some thinkers became skeptical of claims about the sages and
the constancy of their guidance, but they did not abandon the assumption that
public language guides us. Typically, they either advocated reforming the
guiding discourse (dao) or reverting to natural, pre-linguistic behavior
patterns. Language rested neither on cognition nor private, individual
subjectivity. Chinese philosophy of mind played mainly an application (execution
of instructions) role in Chinese theory of language.
Chinese theory of language
centered on counterparts of reference or denotation. To have mastered a term was
for the xin and senses working together to be able to distinguish or divide
realities correctly. ‘Correctly’ was the rub because the standard of correctness
was discourse. It threatened a regress–we need a discourse to guide our
practical interpretation of discourse. Philosophy of mind played a role in
various attempted solutions. Chinese philosophers mostly agreed (except for
innatists) that actual distinguishing would be relative to past training,
experience, assumptions and situation. However, they did not regard experience
as a mental concept in the classic Western sense of the being a subjective or
private content. An important concept in philosophy of mind was, therefore, de
(virtuosity). One classic formulation identified de as embodied, inner dao. De
though inner, was more a set of dispositions than a mental content. The link
seemed to be that when we learn a dao’s content, it produces de. Good de comes
from successful teaching of a dao. When you follow dao, you need not have the
discourse playing internally. We best view it as the behavioral ability to
conform to the intended pattern of action–the path (performance dao). It would
be second nature. We may think of de, accordingly, as both learned and natural.
We can distinguish Chinese thought from Indo-European thought, then, not only in
its blending affective and cognitive functions, but also in its avoiding the
nuts and bolts of Western mind-body analysis. Talk of inner and outer did
distinguish the psychological from the social, but it did not mean inner was
mental content. The xin has a physical and temporal location and consists of
dispositions to make distinctions in guiding action. It is not a set of
inherently representational ideas (mental pictograms). Similarly, we find no
clear counterpart to the Indo-European conception of the faculty of reason.
Euclidean method in geometry and the formulation of the syllogism in logic
informed this Indo-European concept. Absent this apparatus, Chinese thinkers
characterized the heart-mind as either properly or improperly trained, virtuous,
skilled, reliable, etc. Prima facie, however, these were social standards
threatened circularity. The heart-mind required some kind of mastery of a body
of practical knowledge. Chinese thinkers explored norm realism mainly through an
innatist strategy. Innatists sought to picture the heart-mind’s distinctions as
matching norms or moral patterns implicit in the natural stasis or harmony of
the world. Return to Outline Historical Developments: The Classical Period
Confucius indirectly addressed philosophy of mind questions in his theory of
education. He shaped the moral debate in a way that fundamentally influenced the
classical conception of xin (heart-mind).
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