Responses to Mozi's Ears and Eyes: The Epistemic Role of Perception in Chinese Thought

Discourses on the epistemic role of sense perception in Chinese thought can be traced to the Warring States period. Mozi’s (ca. 470-391 BCE) simple idea of perceiving is believing as a criterion of reliable knowledge may have initiated an intellectual tradition consisting of many different strands of thought regarding perceptual knowledge. Some of these discourses are about what a contemporary philosopher may call “the Problem of Perception” or an unacceptable “veil of perception” between the mind and the world, while others are devoted to acknowledge a category of knowledge in which sense experience plays an evidential role. One also sees issues of eyewitness testimony, which is the oral or textual transmission of first-hand perceptual experience, as well as human perceptual limits, to which the notions of both the employment of the multitude’s ears and eyes and openness versus hiddenness are provided as responses. These issues mostly emerge in relation to the religious beliefs in the existence of ghosts, spirits, and human immortals. Progressively, a whole range of issues are raised concerning all the multi-faceted aspects of perception in the evolving religious and philosophical traditions in premodern China.

    This doctoral thesis presents case studies of these lines of thought within the wide textual horizon of premodern Chinese texts. It delineates its scope and methodology with the following reflections. Firstly, this research is engaged in the recent scholarly interest in Chinese epistemology. Unlike previous studies, which mainly focused on other sources of knowledge such as inference or introspection in early Chinese texts (Lenk and Paul 1993, Keightley 2002, Rosker 2008, and Creller 2017), it pays full attention to the epistemological issues of perception and (eyewitness) testimony. In contrast, there are other related studies exploring this topic in relation to internal perception (heart-mind) and names (Geaney 2002, 2017) as well as sagacious perceptiveness (Brown and Bergeton 2008). On top of these, the thesis is also in line with the flexible approach that adjusts the tools of contemporary analytic epistemology for textual analysis (Klein and Klein 2016). Secondly, to trace the implied positions and concepts which are not always well defined and conceptualized, the research is subject-oriented and brings together premodern Chinese views across various periods, highlighting that the shared desire in later ages to base knowledge on sense perception has an ancient root. Thirdly, the research deals with the problem that scholars’ readings of the texts are strongly influenced by theory loading descriptions and what these terms are understood. They might all use the same words (e.g., empiricist or scientific) to describe the same Chinese texts without understanding them in the same way.