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Chinese Perspective for World Science and Technology
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11548 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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10 / 1986 |
2,691 Words |
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Joseph Needham
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I should like to say something, about the question of logic in China and the West. One of the earliest things I noticed about my Chinese friends, some forty years ago, was that so often they would not answer "yes" or "no" to my formulations, but something like "well, not exactly." Undoubtedly this was an outward and visible sign of a certain subtlety of thought which runs right through the whole of Chinese culture. From the point of view of the "Science and Civilization in China" project, it is obviously of the highest importance to elucidate what part logic and logical thinking played in relation to the development of the sciences in China.
At the present time, two of our collaborators, Janusz Chmielewski from Warsaw and Derk Bodde from Philadelphia, are addressing themselves to this problem. The results are, as usual, somewhat surprising. First, it can be shown that formal logic was more fully and perfectly incorporated in the linguistic structure of Chinese than of any Indo-European language. Secondly, all the main methods of reasoning and forms of syllogisms can be found in Chinese philosophical land medical writings from the fourth century onwards. But thirdly, it is clear that no Aristotle, no Panini, arose in China to codify successfully the features of formal logic - Kungsun Lung and the Mohists attempted to achieve this, but because of the lack of interest of subsequent generations their writings were only imperfectly preserved and now have to be rescued from textual corruption. It may have been precisely because of the profoundly logical structure of the language that the need for codification was never felt. Fourthly, by the same token, the minds of Chinese thinkers were not mesmerized by abstract logic, so that full weight could be given to all kinds of nuances rising above the "single vision" of the "either-or" dichotomy. Fifth, and lastly, comes the question, what relation did all this have to the development of science in China? The answer seems to be that it had no effect at all, whether in mathematics, astronomy, geology, physiology, or medicine. Only the breakthrough to modern science did not take place, and it seems in the highest degree unlikely that that could have been due to the presence of formal logical in the West. For as we al know, the founding fathers of the scientific revolution agreed with Francis Bacon's dicturm that logica est inutilis ad inventionem scientiarum [logic is useless for discovery in the sciences].
Speaking as one who was himself a working scientist for many years, I remember always feeling how unsatisfactory the "A or not-A" disjunction was. Of course, it was obviously useful, indeed quite essential, for classification, but always as a preliminary sorting to be followed by further sortings. It was thus the basic tool of the taxonomist, no doubt. But for the chemist, the physicist, or the physiologist, it seemed radically unsatisfactory because in Nature A is always changing into Not-A as one looks at it, and the difficulty is to catch it on the hop. In my time at Cambridge, no science undergraduate or research student ever dreamt of taking courses in formal logic, and over many years of attendance at tea-club meetings and lectures by colleagues, I hardly remember any occasions when people had to be criticized on account of logical fallacies. The premises and the statistical treatments were always much more important.
As for the history of Chinese scientific thought, the avoidance of rigid "A or not-A" conceptions can be seen very well in the relations of the Yang and Yin. These two great forces in the universe were always thought of in terms of a
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