Abstract

The purpose of the dissertation is to evaluate the claim, often made by Sinologists and those influenced by them, that Classical Chinese is a defective, or at least very exotic, tool of thought. The dissertation's first chapter provides a short history of this general perception and then narrows the focus of the inquiry to matters of logicality, rather than to the less tractable properties of the language that have been addressed in the literature, such as vagueness of inhospitality to abstraction. The next chapter consists in an analysis of the notion of logic that allows for a clear sense in which one language can be said to be more logical than another or to differ logically from another. Subsequent chapters this analysis is put to use in two ways. First, it is used to provide a reading of surviving logical texts from ancient times under which the conspicuously fallacious reasoning in them is not attributed to misleading traits that are peculiar to classical Chinese. Secondly, it is used to judge in a preliminary way the richness of rule-governed paraphrase in Chinese which, on the analysis of logic presupposed, is a proper measure of how well logical thought proceeds in a given language. In the latter part of the dissertation, two new, but related matters are taken up. First, the perception of Chinese as ratiocinatively peculiar is explained by showing how the language apparently violates expectations aroused by the structure of European languages which have been hypostasized by formal logicians and linguists as essential to all language. Secondly, the traditional Chinese disinterest in logic is explained as the consequence of the Chinese distaste for the sort of informational redundancy that the study of logic rests upon