On the Very Idea of Correlative Thinking

On the Very Idea of Correlative Thinking

Yiu-ming Fung*Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Abstract

This article aims at providing a general picture of the idea of correlative thinking developed bysinologists and philosophers in the field of Chinese and comparative studies, including MarcelGranet, Joseph Needham, A. C. Graham, David Hall and Roger Ames. As a matter of fact, thereis no exactly the same view among these scholars when they use the term ‘‘correlative thinking’’to describe the Chinese mode of thinking; but they all recognize, more or less, the term’s implica-tion as ‘‘non-logical’’ or ‘‘pre-logical’’, ‘‘non-rational’’ or ‘‘irrational’’, ‘‘intuitive-associative’’ or‘‘beyond analytic thinking’’. Based on this presumption, some of them think that there is ‘‘irredu-cibility’’from the root level of (correlative) thinking to the upper level of (analytic) thinking orthat there is ‘‘incommensurability’’ between correlative and analytic thinking.

Based on the contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially DonaldDavidson’s holism of the mental and the principle of charity, I shall argue that the thesis of ‘‘pre-logical’’, ‘‘illogical’’ or ‘‘non-logical’’ is self-refuting. I shall also demonstrate that the view of‘‘incommensurability’’ between correlative and analytic thinking and the thesis of ‘‘unanalyzabil-ity’’ of correlative thinking shared by most of these scholars are not well-argued but taken as aprimary fact. The conclusion of this article is that there is no thinking by correlation and analogywhich cannot be understood in terms of analytic concepts and which can escape from the logicalor rational space.

1. Macel Granet’s Idea of Correlative Thinking

According to Joseph Needham and A. C. Graham’s view, the idea of correlative thinkingwas originated from Marcel Granet, an influential French sinologist and sociologist in thefirst half of 20th century. His classic work, La pensee chinoise (1934), has been recognizedas asserting that correlative cosmology was ‘a primordial and quintessential expression ofthe ‘‘Chinese mind’’’.1 In studying the ancient Chinese language, Granet claims that, ‘Astudy of the vocabulary highlights the prodigiously concrete character of Chinese con-cepts: virtually the entire totality of words connote single ideas, express manners of waysof perceiving, or an aspect as specific as possible’.2 In contrast to the European way ofthinking, Granet concludes, the language reflects that the traditional Chinese way ofthinking is particular and concrete, rather than abstract or general.

In Granet’s eye, this non-abstract or non-analytic characteristic suggests that the mainfunction of Chinese language is figurative or poetic. Using the language, the ancient Chi-nese thinkers cannot express the idea of causality, even cannot have the logical idea aboutthe rule of non-contradiction. He also thinks that the Chinese sentences are often used ofthe pattern of correlation and expressed in the form of parallelism. From Chinese mythol-ogy, Granet provides an example to demonstrate this point:3

This assemblage of facts regarding the mythology of the Right and Left brings out the structuralcorrelation which is established in China between the universe, the human body and society; all

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of this, the morphology and physiology of the macrocosm and the microcosm forms thedomain of etiquette.

As indicated by Christoph Harbsmeier, Granet’s spirited and seminal article ‘Quelques par-ticularites de la langue et de pensee chinoises’ (1920) is wonderfully clear in his conclusionthat, ‘lacking grammatical forms, [Chinese] is a picturesque and an essentially inarticulatelanguage’.4 So, he thinks that, ‘A language made for poetry and composed of images ratherthan concepts is not only not an instrument of analysis. It also fails to constitute a rich heri-tage of the work of abstraction which each generation has been able to achieve’.5 The Chi-nese language, for him, is inherently inappropriate for scientific analysis and precise scientificdiscourse. In this regard, Granet seems to commit to a kind of linguistic determinism.

Since the ancient Chinese language is considered by Granet, by and large, as workingthrough musical and picturesque symbolization, he speculates that, ‘In this case one mustadmit that when language cannot translate the operations of thought these operationsmust proceed beyond language’.6 Here, Granet seems not only to regard the differencebetween the European and Chinese language or thinking as incommensurable, but also torecognize the Chinese thinking to some extent as ineffable. Nevertheless, Miranda Brownthinks that the idea in Granet’s mature work does not push him to commit to culturalessentialism.7 I agree with Brown that Granet may not be a cultural essentialist; however,his view on the linguistic and conceptual difference does push him to commit to a kindof conceptual relativism which is similar to Thomas Kuhn’s type and also suffers theattack from Donald Davidson’s principle of charity.8

Granet’s non-logical, illogical or trans-logical identification of traditional Chinese lan-guage is not endorsed by Janusz Chmielewski, one of the few pioneers of the study ofChinese logic in the West. He thinks that the syntactic structure of the language ‘couldhardly have any negative bearing on Chinese implicit logic; in fact they are beneficialrather than detrimental to this logic, since they make the Chinese language more similarto the symbolic language of modern logic than any tongue of the Indo-European typecan claim to be’.9

Following Chmielewski’s line of thinking, Christoph Harbsmeier in Needham’s vol-ume has given a full picture of the implicit logic in ancient Chinese texts, in addition tothe theory of explicit logic appeared in the later Mohism. He also indicates the languagein traditional China can be and has been used in scientific investigation. He says,10

If Marcel Granet had known more about the Chinese scientific tradition he would, I like tothink, have expressed himself in a different, less abrasive way. I also believe that if he hadknown more about the precise syntactic structure of Classical Chinese and the very subtlesemantic and syntactic rules governing the use of Classical Chinese grammatical particles, hemight have shown a little more respect for the articulatory power of that language.

Harbsmeier is right to say that the ancient Chinese, like the Greeks, were fond of argu-ments by analogy, but it still makes good sense to study the non-analogical arguments inChina and Greek.11 However, the most important point, I think, is that there is no argu-ment by analogy or correlation which cannot be conceptually expressed and logicallyarticulated. To make a demarcation between analytic and correlative thinking as incom-mensurable is to commit to a mystical view of language.

2. Joseph Needham’s Idea of Correlative Thinking

Following Granet’s idea, Joseph Needham in his Science and Civilisation in China, volume2, also identifies the thinking in ancient China, which he calls ‘correlative thinking’, as

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essentially different from the analytic thinking in the Western world. In using correlativethinking, Needham speculates, most thinkers of the Han dynasty see the world as aninterconnected web in the sense that everything or phenomenon is situated in a dynamiccycle of relations both productive and anti-productive to some others. Besides, the uni-verse is also recognized as having some kind of inductance, correspondence or resonance,in terms of yin-yang and wu-xing (five elements, five phases or five agents), between dif-ferent kinds of things or phenomena in Earth and between Heaven (tian) and human(ren). These characteristics can be constituted in a kind of worldview he calls ‘correlativecosmology’ and its reflection in mode of thought ‘correlative thinking’.

According to Needham, one of the key theses of the so-called ‘correlative cosmology’is about the inductance, correspondence or resonance between Heaven and human. Hedescribes vividly that,12

In correlative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one another, but placed side byside in a pattern, and things influence one another not by acts of mechanical causation, but by akind of ‘inductance’. … The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of onecolossal pattern. Things behaved in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions orimpulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe wassuch that they were endowed with intrinsic nature which made that behaviour inevitable forthem. If they did not behave in those particular ways they would lose their relational positionsin the whole (which made them what they were), and turn into something other than them-selves. They were parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And theyreacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind ofmysterious resonance.

Although Needham regards this application of correlative thinking invented by the Yin-Yang school in the late period of Warring States and the naturalism or organism in theHan dynasty as based on a kind of mysterious resonance, he does not totally follow Gra-net’s non-scientific or anti-scientific thesis. He thinks that Zou Yan’s naturalistic applica-tion of the wu-xing scheme is half-scientific and half-political. It can be used to providean alternative scientific model which is in concordance with the post-Newtonian scienceand its products of investigation in nature can be identified as ‘proto-science’. He doesnot think that the idea of mysterious resonance in the universe is nonsense; instead, herecognizes it as reflection of the pattern or order of the universe. Its feasibility can beexplained with good sense. For example, according to the great Han Confucian DongZhongshu’s view, the reason to confirm or the ground to identify the mysterious reso-nance is that different things or phenomena with the same kind of qi (vital force) or inthe same numerical category will interact with each other. Or, put in Needham’s words,it is because things of the same position in the ever-moving cyclical universe areendowed with some kind of intrinsic nature which will stimulate them approaching toeach other.

For Dong Zhongshu, there are two ways to describe the two kinds of intrinsic natureembedded in the qi of yin and the qi of yang respectively: they are ‘yin and yang’ ifdescribed in a cosmological or naturalistic way; ‘de (beneficent power) and xing (chastisingpower)’ if described in an ethical or humanistic way. It seems that Dong Zhongshu rec-ognizes these as two kinds of description of the same thing (intrinsic nature). In thisregard, he probably believes that there is no gap between fact and value and the natureof things or phenomena in the universe can be described in either way, i.e., either in nat-uralistic (or factual) language or prescriptive (or evaluative) language. In comparison withHilary Putnam or Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of ‘functional unity’, R. M. Hare’s idea of

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‘supervenience’ or John Searle’s idea of ‘derivation of performative acts’ in terms of ‘insti-tutional fact’ in bridging the gap between fact and value, Dong Zhongshu’s bridging ideais neither one of them. His idea of ‘association’ or ‘correspondence’ is nothing but ametaphysical construction by speculation and imagination. Based on this point, I think,he cannot escape from the charge of ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Hence, the so-called ‘correlativecosmology’ grounded on this idea cannot be considered as scientific in a full-fledgedsense.

Based on the Han texts, Needham articulates two principles from the naturalistic appli-cation as the ‘principle of control’ (xiang-zhi) and the ‘principle of masking’ (xiang-hua)which are derived from the ‘principle of production’ and the ‘principle of conquest’ inthe wu-xing scheme. I agree with Needham that these principles can be regarded, in arestricted sense, as heuristic and significant to the understanding of the bio-ecologicalphenomena of the natural world.13 It is only heuristic and significant in a restricted sense,because the ecological environment, either of the macro outside world or the microworld of human body, is not a closed system; anything can play a causal role in relationto another thing of the world if the condition of habitation in the world is changed. Thecomplex world is not rigidly dominated by a dynamic cycle of five functional entitiesthough sometimes some of its phenomena exhibit a small scale of dynamic cycle ofmutual control and mutual masking as mentioned by Needham and others.

Needham stresses that, ‘the conceptual framework of Chinese associate or coordinativethinking was essentially something different from that of European causal and ‘‘legal’’ ornomothetic thinking’.14 I do not think that there is a correlative or associative thinkingin ancient China which is essentially different from or incommensurable to the analyticor causal thinking of the West.15 If the wu-xing scheme provides only a pattern or modelfor describing the order or regularity of the world, it would be functioned as a model ofdescription and there would be no principle derived from this scheme. On the otherhand, even if there are derived principles as mentioned by Needham, it is definitely notthe kind of scientific laws. It may be one of the reasons why Needham claims that, ‘the[Western] mechanical and the quantitative, the forced and the externally imposed, wereall absent’ in Chinese correlative thinking and ‘[t]he notion of Order excluded the notionof Law’.16 I agree that the mode of thinking based on the wu-xing scheme is not scientificin a modern sense, but it is not because it is an alternative thinking which is essentiallydifferent from the Western analytic and causal thinking. The difference is not in the sensethat one side is analytic and the other side non-analytic, or one side causal and the otherside non-causal. It is not scientific in a full-fledged sense, because it is not grounded onobjectively quantificational evidence and its trivial theses are not confirmable in RudolfCarnap’s sense or falsifiable in Karl Popper’s sense, but issued from speculation and imagi-nation.

3. A. C. Graham’s Idea of Correlative Thinking

A. C. Graham believes that ‘all thinking is grounded in analogization’. Different culturesmay have different ground of analogization or ‘metaphorical roots’. For example, themetaphorical root behind Westerners’ ‘matter’ and ‘law’ are different from that behindChinese ‘qi’ and ‘li’ (order, reason or principle). For the ‘outsider’, unlike the ‘insider’who habitually thinks with their concepts, are much less conscious of the differences atthe bottom.17

What are ‘the differences at the bottom’? Borrowing the linguistic structuralistRoman Jakobson’s ideas of ‘paradigm ⁄ syntagm’ and ‘metaphor ⁄metonym’, Graham



argues that, at the bottom of each language or thinking, there is some kind of pre-logi-cal patterning of names that is ‘a stock of paradigms already grouping syntagmatically inchains of oppositions which at their simplest are binary’.18 Based on these ideas comingfrom what Graham calls ‘Semiology’, he believes that we can find the beginning of aconceptual scheme in these chains of oppositions. He calls the thinking in these chains‘correlative’ in contrast with ‘analytic’ in the sense that the former is conceived asspontaneous, pre-logical, and operating at the level of the non-sentential combinationsof words, while the latter is discursive, logical, and operating at the level of proposi-tions.

For Graham, a conceptual scheme is not a system of logically related propositions but apre-logical pattern of names. So he declares that a comparison of Western and Chineseconceptual schemes should begin at the level of non-sentential units. Through his ‘doubleeye’, he seems to be able to see that the structures of Chinese conceptual scheme ‘areexposed nakedly by the tendency to parallelism in the classical language, and are overlyformulated in the yin-yang cosmological scheme’.19 In comparison with the Westernscheme which tends to center on conflicting opposites (truth ⁄ falsehood, good ⁄evil), hepoints out that the yin-yang scheme is focused on complementary polarities. Some of theEnglish chains of oppositions such as ‘day ⁄ night’ and ‘light ⁄darkness’ seem to fit neatlyinto a yin-yang scheme, but, as stressed by Graham, in the latter A and B are interdepen-dent with A only relatively superior, and the chain does not lead to conflicting dualitysuch as ‘good ⁄evil’. So, he concludes, ‘Our conceptual schemes differ, not in assumingthe truth of contradictory propositions, but in including or excluding different pairs ofwords’.20

Graham’s opinion is mainly based on his deviant notion of ‘conceptual scheme’ and hisinterpretations of Chinese concepts appeared in ancient Chinese texts, especially in philo-sophical texts. His arguments, if valid, assume that there are two levels of thinking (ana-lytic and correlative) and, most importantly, that the latter, in contrast with the former, isspontaneous, pre-logical, and even pre-linguistic though it is presented as a pattern ofoppositions. Besides the mystical characteristic of the so-called ‘pre-logical’ and ‘pre-lin-guistic’ thinking, he also assumes that the meaning of a sentence is dependent on themeaning of the words which occur in the sentence though the truth of the sentence isindependent of its component words. In this regard, Graham seems to adopt an atomisticor ‘building-block’ theory of meaning which is opposite to the idea of holism held byDavidson and many other contemporary philosophers of language. However, I thinkGraham’s view is inaccurate both in the sense that his mystical idea of pre-logical think-ing together with his atomistic theory of meaning is not well argued and in the sense thathis interpretations of the Chinese concepts are not well grounded in Chinese sources.Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, his idea of the two levels of thinking, hisexplanation of the differences of Chinese and Western conceptual schemes is more con-sistent with Davidson’s principle of charity than his idea of bilingual but distinct under-standing would suggest.

Why do I think Graham’s mystical idea of pre-logical thinking is not justifiable? Oneof the major reasons is that the so-called ‘pre-logical chain of oppositions’ is a self-contra-dictory description (How can we make sense of oppositions without logic?). AlthoughGraham borrows his idea of binary oppositions from Jakobson, unlike Graham whounderstands them as ‘pre-logical’, Jakobson stresses their ‘logical structure’.21 Jakobson’sidea of ‘markedness’ is based on the logical nature of oppositions applied both at the levelof the signifier and at the level of the signified.22 In Semiology or Semiotics, we knowthat there is a ‘semiotic square’, which is adapted from the ‘logical square of oppositions’,



to characterize different kinds of oppositions such as contradiction, contrariety, and com-plementarity or implication. It is unintelligible to say that these binary relations are oppo-sitions without any logical sense.

If we accept, for argument’s sake again, Graham’s building-block thesis, we still have aquestion, i.e., is it possible for Chinese people to have a chain of complementary opposi-tions, such as ‘day ⁄night’ and ‘yin ⁄yang’, without some beliefs about daytime and sunshineand some other beliefs about nighttime and the Moon? Is it possible for Westerners tohave a pattern of contrasting naming, such as ‘good ⁄evil’ and ‘true ⁄ false’, without anyintention and propositional attitude? If our conceptual thinking really operates at the verybeginning on Graham’s underground level, Chinese thinking (in ancient times) on thislevel, for example, would have ‘day ⁄night’ opposition without backing up by any beliefsabout day and night. In other words, they would think of ‘day ⁄night’ or ‘yin ⁄ yang’ ascomplementary without believing that ‘there is sunshine at daytime’, ‘the moon appearsat night’, and so on. Can we imagine that Chinese people (in ancient times) are thinkingof ‘day ⁄ night’ correlatively first without any beliefs and then later thinking about themanalytically with propositional attitudes? What is the rationale for this learning process?How can Graham identify these correlative concepts or ideas without assigning somebackground knowledge to the speakers?

Graham thinks that learning Chinese words through guess from the entries of Math-ews’s dictionary would never be at home; instead, to understand the meanings of thesewords, such as ‘an’ (safe) and its opposite ‘wei’ (danger), is not to analyze them in a logicalway but to correlate them within different contextual patterns.23 However, these ‘contex-tual patterns’, for Graham, are not patterns in sentential context, but patterns of namingat ‘pre-logical’ level. This may be one of the reasons why he considers his ‘pre-logical’terms as having ‘no other content than the oppositions themselves’.24 But, when he usessome examples to illustrate the meanings of these sentential context-free terms or names,it indicates clearly that the terms’ contents are more than the oppositions themselves. Hesays, for example, ‘to be yang not yin is nothing else but to be light not dark, or male notfemale’.25 It is obvious that the example is not consistent with his ‘no more content’ the-sis, because ‘to be yang not yin’ is not the same as ‘to be A not B’ or ‘to be A not �A’.In order to know the similarity between yang and light or male and the differencebetween each pair, we have to know some contents more than just oppositions. If theterms have no other content than oppositions, then ‘to be yang not yin’ would have nodifference from ‘to be A not B’ or ‘to be A not �A’. If so, how can this abstract and log-ical idea be understood at the ‘pre-logical’ level?

Graham identifies his idea of correlative thinking or naming as ‘pre-logical’, ‘pre-lin-guistic’, ‘spontaneous’, and also ‘mystical’. It is mystical in the first sense that Graham’sidea presupposes some kind of mentalist meaning which is independent of analyticthinking; it is mystical in the second sense that Graham treats his ‘pre-logical pattern ofnames’ as the products of a classifying act of naming without understanding them asthe singular terms of logic. Nevertheless, in what sense could this kind of ‘naming’ beunderstood as a classifying act? Isn’t it necessary to have some sense in which some-thing can be named rightly under a classifying act while others cannot? To use Gra-ham’s example, if Chinese classifying yang (sheep or goat) is different from Englishclassifying sheep in the sense that the English word ‘sheep’ cannot be used to refer to agoat but the Chinese word ‘yang’ can be used to refer to both a sheep and a goat,Chinese people should know at the same time that it is right to say ‘yang’ to coverboth sheep and goats and wrong to refer to sheep only. It seems to be the same situa-tion as indicated by Davidson that we can master the distinction between erroneously



applying the concept cow to bulls when faced by a bull and correctly applying a con-cept that covers both cows and bulls through a test of learning to explain errors.26 Tocompare a foreign language with home language, I think we can also use this kind oftest for learning to explain the differences. For the same reason, if someone says ‘That’syang’ when faced by a sheep consistently, and says the same thing when faced by agoat at only one time, a Westerner may not know at that time whether she is errone-ously applying the word ‘yang’ (if he has the impression that it is equivalent to ‘sheep’)or correctly applying the word that refers to both sheep and goats. Until one day heknows more about her background beliefs through a triangulated interaction asdescribed by Davidson, he could be sure that her concept yang is not the same as hisconcept sheep. It is unintelligible that without the concept of applicability of names wecan have an act of classification. The job of classifying names cannot be done merely atthe level of names, especially not at the so-called ‘pre-logical’ level, which is separatedfrom or independent of the context of sentence or proposition. Graham is not onlyneglecting Davidson’s holism, but also arguing for his mystical version of meaningatomism in a self-refuting way.

4. David Hall and Roger Ames’s Idea of Correlative Thinking

In contrast to Graham’s theoretical or structural interpretation, David Hall and RogerAmes stress that non-analytic correlative or non-rationalized analogical thinking ‘cannotbe formalized or overly rationalized without violating the very premise of embedded aes-thetic relatedness’.27 They prefer to the so-called aesthetic or informal interpretation. Gra-ham does not think that there was no logical thinking other than correlative thinking inancient China, but Hall and Ames do think that the ancient Chinese thinking is domi-nated with this pre-logical or illogical characteristic. They believe that,28

Rational or logical thinking, grounded in analytic, dialectical and analogical argumentation,stresses the explanatory power of physical causation. In contrast, Chinese thinking depends upona species of analogy which may be called ‘correlative thinking’. … Correlative thinking is a spe-cies of spontaneous thinking grounded in informal and ad hoc analogical procedures presuppos-ing both association and differentiation. The regulative element in this modality of thinking isshared patterns of culture and tradition rather than common assumptions about causal necessity.

The distinctive idea of Hall and Ames is that they not only stress that essential differencebetween the rational or logical thinking and correlative or analogical thinking, in thesense that the former is related to physical causation, substance and logical order whilethe latter to meaningful disposition, process and aesthetic order, but also claim that theanalogies of the latter lies at the basis of both analytic and dialectical thinking of the for-mer. So they assert that, ‘Concepts based upon correlative thinking are image clusters inwhich complex semantic associations are allowed to reflect into one another in such away as to provide rich, indefinitely ‘vague’ meaning. Univocity is, therefore, impossible.Aesthetic associations dominate. Submerged by analysis and dialectic, metaphor and anal-ogy persist as the ground of the language’. They also believe that, ‘One may justifiablyclaim that correlative thinking persists as the root of causal thought since, as seems to bethe case, metaphors ground literal, scientific language’.29 In other words, they share withGraham’s view that the informal stage or pre-logical level of thinking is the ground orroot of analytic or rational thinking. So they declare the following fundamentalist the-sis:30



If process is to be held primary, aesthetic order must be fundamental. And this means that, inappreciating any given event, inconsistency (nonsubstitutability) is prior to consistency, pluralityto unity, disjunction to conjunction. Thus, all unities are ad hoc: There can be no cosmos inany final sense.

For Hall and Ames, this fundamental base cannot be articulated or analyzed in an ultimatesense. They think that,31 ‘In contradistinction to the rational mode of thinking whichprivileges univocity, correlative thinking involves the association of significances intoclustered images which are treated as meaning complexes ultimately unanalyzable intoany more basic components’. It seems to Hall and Ames that the images and metaphors(or the analogies before being analyzed) associated with correlative thinking cannot befurther analyzed and thus do not presuppose or entail any other linguistic or semanticentities. Nevertheless, as analyzed by Graham’s hero, Gilbert Ryle, this is not the case;instead, Ryle says, ‘[T]o picture, image, or fancy one sees or hears also entails thinking’in a strained sense32; and ‘Imaging, being one among many ways of utilizing knowledge,requires that the relevant knowledge has been got and not lost’.33 Besides, if we acceptthe current thesis of holism of the mental, it is obvious that this root idea of semanticentities is not sustainable. It is because this idea excludes its semantic entities from thecontext of propositional attitude. Without propositional attitudes or beliefs of analyticthinking, how can it be possible for people to learn or know the imaginative or figurativelanguage such as the metaphor and analogy in Hall and Ames’s ‘root sense’?

5. Concluding Remarks

Granet may be the first scholar who characterizes the ‘Chinese Mind’ as the mind of ‘cor-relative thinking’. Needham follows this line to discuss ‘correlative thinking’ in generaland the specific ‘symbolic correlation’ in Chinese cosmology in terms of a special kind of‘organism’. In comparison to these two pioneers, Graham addresses in more detail the nat-ure of correlative thinking and lays much stress on its unique significance in Chinese cul-ture. What Graham’s viewpoint is divergent from Granet’s is that Graham does not acceptGranet’s generalization; instead, Graham thinks that correlative thinking had not yetgained wide acceptance among social and philosophical thinkers in pre-imperial Chinathough it was with full commitment by thinkers during the Han dynasty. In comparisonwith Needham’s viewpoint, Graham does not accept Needham’s view that correlativethinking is not ‘alogical’ or ‘pre-logical;’ instead, he thinks that correlative thinking is pre-logical and pre-linguistic in the sense that ‘the correlative layer is submerged under thethinking which builds on it’ and, specifically speaking, ‘the analytic upper layer which isthicker and denser in the West is grounded on the correlative stratum of thinking which ismore fully exposed in China’.34 Although Hall and Ames take side with Granet in identi-fying correlative thinking with a fundamental commitment of the Chinese sensibility, theythink that the ‘aesthetic ordering’ based on spontaneous correlation is beyond logical anal-ysis and rational communication,35 which seems not far away from Graham’s ‘alogical’ or‘pre-logical’ thesis. As a matter of fact, there is no exactly the same view among thesescholars when they use the term ‘correlative thinking’ to describe the Chinese mode ofthinking; but they all recognize, more or less, the term’s implication as ‘non-logical’ or‘pre-logical’, ‘non-rational’ or ‘irrational’, ‘intuitive-associative’ or ‘beyond analytic think-ing’. Based on this presumption, some of them think that there is ‘irreducibility’ from theroot level of (correlative) thinking to the upper level of (analytic) thinking or that there is‘incommensurability’ between correlative and analytic thinking.



It seems to me that people who assert there is an essential difference between analyticand correlative thinking have never given any evidence to prove it is the case except totake it as a primary fact. I think, according to Davidson’s Principle of Charity, if there isany difference between the ‘Western analytic thinking’ and the so-called ‘Chinese correl-ative thinking’, we cannot explain the difference without a common ground betweenthem. I have argued for this point elsewhere and would not repeat here.36 I think thatthinking in correlation or association is not thinking other than that of the analytic kind;it is still thinking in the rational space. Thinking analytically, discursively or rationallydoes not mean that someone always thinks on the basis of empirical evidence or withcausal explanation; it means only that s ⁄he thinks in the rational space and thus cannotthink beyond logic. If we think by making a particular sentence, say, a metaphor, whichfunctions beyond its literal meaning, the sentence can be understood as a specific speechact other than that which functions directly on its literal meaning (for example, a speechact with perlocutionary effect); but this does not mean that it goes outside the rationalspace. Similarly, even though thinking in correlation or association, like the Chinesethinking in the pattern with the pair of yin-yang and the model of wu-xing, may not befully grounded on the empirical evidence of the physical world, it should not be under-stood as illogical (or irrational) or non-logical (or non-rational). In other words, thinkingfrom a non-factual or non-physical perspective, such as a moral or aesthetic, metaphysicalor religious perspective, or thinking not fully based on factual evidence, should not beunderstood as thinking other than analytic thinking or beyond the rational space.

As a matter of fact, the thinkers or scientists in the ancient period of China had accu-mulated a huge of empirical observations from the physical and human world and theyused the scheme of yin-yang and wu-xing to characterize some kinds of feature of theevents in the world, i.e., things are often of the relation of mutual interaction, and theyare often in contrast in some aspect and complementary in other aspect to each other. Itseems that these thinkers or scientists put too much emphasis on some kind of character-istic (and simultaneously ignored some other kind of characteristic) and thus over-general-ized some kind of pattern to all the events in the world37; so, sometimes their applicationof the patterning thinking is workable, but sometimes arbitrary. In general, thinking incorrelation or association is not other thinking than the analytic kind; it is just the rationalthinking in correlation or association.

Short Biography

Yiu-ming Fung is a chair professor of the Division of Humanities at the Hong KongUniversity of Science and Technology. He received his PhD degree in philosophy fromthe Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1984. He is an analytic philosopher with specialinterest in Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy. Before joining the HKUST,he was a research fellow at the Institute of East Asian Philosophies, Singapore, from 1985to 1987, and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1987 to 1997. In1991 and 1993, he visited the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, as a research pro-fessor. He was a visiting scholar in the Institute for Chinese Studies and the Faculty ofPhilosophy, the University of Oxford, in 2003. Fung is the author of several books,including The Methodological Problems of Chinese Philosophy (1989); Chinese Philosophy in theAncient Period, 4 volumes (1992); Gong-Sun-Long-Zi: A Perspective of Analytic Philosophy(1999); and The Myth of Transcendent Immanence: A Perspective of Analytic Philosophy onContemporary Neo-Confucianism (2003). He has also published more than 90 researchpapers both in Chinese and English.



Notes

* Correspondence: Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay,Kowloon, Hong Kong (20 August 2010 -) Flat 5, Westminster Court, 1 Arthray Road, Botley, Oxford OX2 9AA,UK (November 2009 - August 2010) . Email: [email protected]

1 Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1985), p. 351.2 Marcel Granet, Etudes sociologiques, p. 102, cf. 117–8, quoted from Miranda Brown’s translation in ‘UnilinealEvolutionism, Essentialism, and Its Sinological Alternatives’, paper presented at the Annual American Asianist Orga-nization Meeting, San Francisco, 6–9 April 2006, p. 19, note 56. See http://rwxy.tsinghua.edu.cn/xi-suo/lsx/Learning/meeting2005/papers/dongmuda.pdf3 Marcel Granet, ‘Right and Left in China’, translated by Rodney Needham, in Rodney Needham (ed.), Right andLeft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 57–8.4 See Harbsmeier 22–3.5 Marcel Granet, ‘Quelques particularites de la langue et de pensee chinoises’, p. 154, quoted from Harbsmeier’stranslation, p. 23.6 See Harbsmeier 153.7 Brown, op. cit., p. 21.8 Detailed arguments on this point can be found in Fung 117–64.9 Janusz Chmielewski, ‘Notes on Early Chinese Logic’, Rocznik Orientaistyczny (Warsaw), part IV, Vol. 26, No. 2,1965, p. 103.10 See Harbsmeier 24.11 See Harbsmeier 264–5.12 See Needham 280–1.13 See Needham 257–8.14 See Needham 286.15 Detailed arguments against Needham’s idea of ‘correlative thinking’ can be found in Yiu-ming Fung, ‘Philoso-phy in the Han Dynasty’, in Bo Mou (ed.), History of Chinese Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 269–302.16 See Needham 290.17 See Graham [1992] 61–2.18 See Graham [1992] 62.19 See Graham [1992] 64.20 Ibid.21 Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), p. 115. He and hisstudent Morris Halle also remark that, ‘[T]he binary opposition is a child’s first logical operation’. See Jakobson andMorris Halle, Fundaments of Language (Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1956), p. 60.22 Jakobson mentions that, ‘Every single constituent of any linguistic system is built on an opposition of two logicalcontradictories: the present of an attribute (markedness) in contraposition to its absence (unmarkedness) ’. See Ja-kobson, Selected Writings, ed. by Stephen Rudy (Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1985), p. 85, cited in John Lechte, FiftyKey Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 62.23 See Graham [1992] 67.24 See Graham [1992] 209.25 Ibid.26 See Davidson. The quotation, which is a little different from the published version, is from Davidson’s word file, p.7.27 See Hall and Ames 141.28 David Hall and Roger Ames, ‘Chinese philosophy’, in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Lon-don: Routledge, 1998), pp. 3–4. Retrieved 11 January 2006, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/G001SECT129 See Hall and Ames 136.30 See Hall and Ames 138, 179.31 Hall and Ames, ‘Chinese philosophy’, p. 4.32 See Ryle 251.33 See Ryle 257.34 See Graham [1986] 23.35 See Hall and Ames 257.36 Detailed arguments for this point can be found in Fung 117–62.37 This may have some political or ideological reasons.



Works Cited

Davidson, Donald. ‘Condition of Thought.’ The Mind of Donald Davidson. Eds. J. Brandl and W. Gombocz.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989. 193–200.

Fung, Yiu-ming. ‘Davidson’s Charity in the Context of Chinese Philosophy.’ Davidson Philosophy and Chinese Phi-losophy: Constructive Engagement. Ed. Bo Mou. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2006. 117–62.

Graham, A.C. Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking. Singapore: The Institute of East Asian Philosophies,1986.

——. Unreason within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality. LaSalle: Open Court, 1992.Hall, David and Roger Ames. Anticipating China: Thinking through the narratives of Chinese and Western Culture.

Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.Harbsmeier, Christoph. Science and Civilisation in China (Joseph Needham), Vol: 7, part I: Language and Logic. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1956.Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970.



Documents

On the Very Idea of Correlative Thinking