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Zhi and the Epistemic Landscape in the Xunzi A View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa KNOWLEDGE AND CONDUCT: ZHI AND THE EPISTEMIC LANDSCAPE IN THE XUNZI A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE OFFICE OF GRADUATE EDUCATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PHILOSOPHY OCTOBER 2016 By Kuan-Hung Chen Dissertation Committee: Roger Ames, Co-Chairperson Vrinda Dalmiya, Co-Chairperson Chung-ying Cheng Masato Ishida David McCraw ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on reexamining the epistemic landscape of Xunzi’s philosophy. Starting with the notion of person-in-relationship (to which relationship is a built-in, rather than an add-on, element), I part ways with epistemic atomism and explore the most significant aspects of the Xunzian conception of knowledge-and-wisdom (zhi) in the communal context: knowing how and knowing who. I argue that both knowing how and knowing who in the Xunzi point to a certain kind of cultivated responsiveness. While epistemic atomism aims at representational accuracy and certainty, Xunzi’s exclusive attention on responsiveness instead of representation is intimately associated with the cosmology that reality is a continual transformational process. Such an emphasis on responsiveness extends to his positive treatment towards metaphor (linguistic responsiveness), imagination (intellectual responsiveness), and wisdom (practical responsiveness). Since wisdom is a unifying intellectual virtue and it is almost impossible to understand wisdom in an impersonal way, I then return to the very notion of the Xunzian person and articulate the core intellectual virtues from Xunzi’s perspective. I argue that Xunzi’s regarding of exemplars as epistemic paradigms provides valuable insights for the exemplarist turn in virtue epistemology. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ i i Chapter1: Introduction ....................................................................................................................1 I. Historical Background .........................................................................................................2 II. Philosophical Contexts: Then and Now ...............................................................................7 III. Literature Review ..............................................................................................................13 IV. An Overview of the Argument .........................................................................................20 Chapter 2: Persons in Relationships .............................................................................................26 I. “Person” as a Conceptual Lens ............................................................................................28 II. The Cartesian Model of “Person” .......................................................................................32 III. The Kantian Model of “Person" ........................................................................................39 IV. The Xunzian Model of “Person" ......................................................................................48 Chapter 3: Knowing as Skill Cultivation ......................................................................................56 I. Xin 心 and Zhi 知 .................................................................................................................57 II. Neng 能 and Zhi 知 .............................................................................................................63 III. Quan 全 and Zhi 知 ...........................................................................................................71 IV. A Case Study of Perceptual Illusions in the Xunzi ...........................................................77 V. Water Instead of Mirror: Metaphor of Responsiveness .....................................................81 Water as Responsiveness .............................................................................................82 Certainty, Fallibility and Reliability ............................................................................85 Truthfulness and the Normative Paths .........................................................................89 Chapter 4: Knowing as Acquainting People Through Communication ........................................93 I. Key Assumptions of the Realist Interpretation of the Doctrine of Zhengming ...................95 II. Internal and External Critiques of Realism ......................................................................102 Internal Critique: Later Wittgenstein .........................................................................102 External Critique: Cosmological and Philosophical Context of the Yijing ..............106 III. A Hermeneutical Interpretation of the Doctrine of Zhengming ......................................112 VI. Knowing People in Communal Communication ............................................................126 ii Chapter 5: Metaphor, Imagination, and Wisdom ........................................................................136 I. Metaphor and the Xunzi .....................................................................................................137 The Peirce-Slingerland Approach ..............................................................................138 Metaphor and Context Sensitivity .............................................................................140 A Xunzian Example ...................................................................................................143 II. Imagination and the Xunzi ................................................................................................147 The Aristotelian Framework ......................................................................................148 Imagination in the Yijing: A Philosophical Context ..................................................151 Imagination in the Xunzi ............................................................................................156 III. Wisdom (with Reference to Knowledge) and the Xunzi .................................................161 The Marginalization of Wisdom ................................................................................161 Wisdom and Partiality in the Xunzi ..........................................................................164 Just Add Water ...........................................................................................................167 Chapter 6: Exemplars as Sources of Normativity for Knowledge and Conduct ........................172 I. Virtue Epistemology and Key Epistemic Virtues in the Xunzi .........................................175 Core Intellectual Virtues in the Xunzi ........................................................................177 Epistemic Villains in the Xunzi ..................................................................................181 II. Rethinking Skillfulness: Propositions or Acquaintance? .................................................184 Skillfulness and Propositional Knowledge ................................................................184 Skillfulness and Knowledge by Acquaintance ..........................................................189 III. Acquaintance, Reality, and Exemplarism .......................................................................194 Knowledge by Acquaintance and Reality in the Xunzi ..............................................195 Zagzebski’s Moral Exemplarism and the Xunzi ........................................................197 Epistemic Exemplars and Epistemic Normativity .....................................................202 Chapter 7: Epilogue ....................................................................................................................208 I. Review of the Chapters ......................................................................................................208 II. Some Objections ..............................................................................................................211 Objection 1: Knowledge by Representation Cannot Be Replaced by Knowledge by Acquaintance ..................................................................211 iii Objection 2: The Xunzian Intellectual Virtues Could Actually Be Intellectual Vices ....................................................................................212 Objection 3: Xunzi’s Philosophy Does Not Bring New Elements to Virtue Epistemology ...........................................................................213 III. Concluding Remarks .......................................................................................................214 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................218 iv v Chapter 1 Introduction The inquiry of this dissertational project starts from an uncommon interpretative approach of a key passage in the Xunzi. In this passage, the relations among junzi 君子 (exemplary persons), fa 法 (models) and lei 類 (categories for analogical extension) take the central stage (K12.1): There are lords who produce chaos in their states, but there are no countries that are naturally chaotic; there are distinguished persons who can bring order
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