Frank Patrick Saunders Jr

The question of whether or not early Chinese philosophers had a concept of truth has been the topic of some scholarly debate over the past few decades. The present essay offers a novel assessment of the debate, and suggests that no answer is fully satisfactory, as the plausibility of each turns in no small part on difficult and unsettled philosophical issues prior to the interpretation of any ancient Chinese philosophical texts—particularly the issues of what it means to “have a concept” and how we understand the concept of truth itself. This essay summarizes prominent views within the debate over truth and Chinese philosophy and offers conditional assessments of each answer with respect to contemporary theories of concepts and theories of truth. The essay concludes with an appeal to methodological and interpretive pluralism, within reasonable constraints, in discussions of this topic.

A longstanding debate within comparative philosophy concerns what role (if any) the notion of truth plays in ancient Chinese philosophy. In this paper we advance a new methodology for exploring how truth figures into ancient Chinese texts. We rely on a minimal characterization of truth that offers a theoretically neutral starting place for our inquiry. Then we demonstrate how to use that method when approaching ancient Chinese texts, and how it accounts for both where and why truth appears in that canon. As a result, we identify several minimalist truth predicates that are operant in those texts and use them to discuss the alethic phenomena that do and do not arise in the ancient Chinese philosophical tradition. This methodology, we offer, can be used as a springboard for identifying and studying alethic phenomena in other philosophical traditions, making it a useful tool for comparative philosophy.