University of Heidelberg

The first aim of the project is to reconstruct argumentative practices in the interrelated areas of education, law, exegesis (or “canonical studies,” jingxue 經學), historiography, and natural studies (or “the extension of knowledge through the investigation of things,” gewu zhizhi 格物致知). In each of these areas, the project will try to understand implicit and explicit standards of validity by (i) identifying specific habits of inference and analogy, conventions of description, as well as ways of using and disputing evidence; (ii) capturing implicit and explicit criteria of validity, veracity, credibility, coherence, compatibility (e.g., with the voice of the sages), and applicability (to issues at hand); (iii) recording and defining the terms, or metalanguage(s), in which arguments and knowledge claims are evaluated; (iv) tracing the sources from which such metalanguages are built; and (v) examining to what extent metalanguages and criteria of evaluation are shared among discrete discursive fields. The second aim of the project is to trace how the standards of validity recovered by addressing these questions were transformed, together with the argumentative practices in which they were embodied, once new forms of rationality became known or were forced upon Chinese discourses in the wake of the asymmetrical flows induced by the Euro-American and subsequent Japanese intrusions.

    Translated into the various sub-fields, these leitmotifs lead the project to examine diverse but related issues. In the area of education, the focus will be on analyses of examination essays, with special regard to formal requirements and rhetorical devices; standards and terminology of evaluation; didactic practices; and genre definitions as exemplified in model essays. A second major theme is the role of calligraphy in examination culture. Starting from an understanding of calligraphy as a form of embodied knowledge, questions to be considered concern the interplay of moral, aesthetic and cognitive considerations in evaluations of “the man behind the brush,” as well as more general issues such as the place of text and image in examination practice. Finally, we will interrogate how these practices changed when the exam curriculum was infused with “Western knowledge” in the final decades of the Qing.

    Studies in the realm of law must begin with a reconstruction of the language of legal codes, paying attention not only to technical terminology but also to stylistic requirements, such as the criteria of clarity, coherence, exhaustiveness and applicability postulated in administrative manuals or guidelines for avoiding unintended ambiguity. Another pertinent topic is the rhetoric of case reports and memorials justifying or rejecting verdicts. Are there explicit standards for the evaluation of factual evidence or are they encoded in conventions for the presentation of oral testimony, the arrangement of facts and the consideration of mitigating circumstances? What role do performative aspects that figure so prominently in literary parodies of legal practice play in the formulation of such conventions? And how did all these conventions respond to the encounter with new legal concepts streaming in from the West and Japan from the 1870s onwards?

    Canonical exegesis is perhaps the best researched of the project’s five sub-fields but even here we do not have a clear picture of the standards by which some commentaries or interpretations were judged as more convincing than others. To help fill this lacuna the project will focus on two aspects: reformulations of the canonical message and uses of philology as a critique of orthodoxy. In regard to the first, topics to be considered include the technical vocabulary of interlinear commentary; justifications for emendations, elisions and glosses; and indirect editorial strategies such as the art of quotation. Themes to be examined in respect to the second range from uses of philological evidence, the rise of phonology and historical semantics, to performative functions of contention. Several studies, e.g., by R. Wagner and myself, have traced the sudden appearance of European and Japanese loan-words in classical exegesis at the end of the Qing, but to-date no author has detailed the effects of these changes on the suasive power of arguments couched in new terms and circulated in the emerging new media.

    Relevant argumentative practices in historiography include the technique of historical analogism whose origins, development and functions shall be studied in concert with analyses of the standards by which individual analogies were proposed or rejected, moral exemplars celebrated or reviled, and events recorded in accordance with or deviation from established typologies of meaning and significance. A second area of inquiry relates to the definition and defense of the ideal of historiographical ‘impartiality’ and the narrative and editorial strategies by which it was supposedly upheld. The project will also examine how this ideal was transformed when confronted with the presumptions of a quite different “universal history,” propagated in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and Japan.

    In the area of natural studies the project will draw on the expertise of its partners and concentrate on the areas of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. In the first two, investigations will focus on strategies of verification and proof, and the discursive efficacy of numbers and calculations. This latter theme intersects with studies conducted at the recently established “Geisteswissenschaftliches Forschungskolleg” on divination in China and Europe at Erlangen. M. Lackner and I are planning a joint workshop tentatively entitled “Arguments by Numbers in Premodern China and Europe” in spring 2011. In the area of medicine, the project will examine the grounds given for diagnoses and prescriptions; the evaluation of patient claims; and techniques for the verification of success or failure. As in the other sub-fields, the insights gained in these studies will be reconsidered in light of changes incited by China’s encounter with European theories and practices.