Meeting of the Aristotelian Society held online on 21 June 2021 at

5:30 p.m.

XIV —SWIMMING HAPPILY IN CHINESE LOGIC

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MICHAEL BEANEY

Dipping in Chinese waters

pulled and pushed by Mo
we see how Zhuangzi caught us
like the happy fish we know
we follow their flow
words matching as they sort us

The Chinese Logic Dialogue. Let us dive straight in with a story,

which I shall call the Chinese logic dialogue.
Joanne and Hugh were discussing a passage from an ancient Chinese
philosophical text.
Joanne said, ‘Look at the dialogue scripted here, this is clev-
erly argued.’
Hugh said, ‘You’re not a Chinese logician, how do you know it is clev-
erly argued?’
Joanne said, ‘You’re not me, how do you know that I don’t know it is
cleverly argued?’
Hugh said, ‘I am not you, so certainly don’t know you; you are cer-
tainly not a Chinese logician, so the case is complete for your not
knowing it is cleverly argued.’
Joanne said, ‘Let’s go back to the beginning. You said, ‘How do you
know it is cleverly argued?’, in asking me which you already knew I
knew it; I know it from using our shared reason.’

This transforms a famous story in the Zhuangzi, the happy fish dia-
logue, which we will examine shortly. The Zhuangzi is the richest
and most intellectually challenging of all the texts of ancient Chinese
philosophy, and it is full of stories which have been interpreted in a
wide variety of ways over the subsequent two millennia. It is one of
the founding texts of Daoism, but it is also central to the entire

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356 MICHAEL BEANEY

landscape of ancient Chinese thought. In this paper I want to explore

some of the logical features of this landscape by focusing on the
happy fish dialogue and addressing what we can call the problem of
Chinese logic. Are there distinctive forms of argumentation and
analysis in ancient Chinese thinking and/or distinctive logical con-

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ceptions and theories? Or can Chinese reasoning be analysed and en-
tirely explained by modern forms of logic, such as propositional
logic and quantificational theory? What implications does this have
for how we interpret historical texts?
In what follows, I will first say more about the problem of
Chinese logic (§ii) before introducing the Zhuangzi and the happy
fish dialogue (§iii). I will then elucidate the key concepts involved in
this dialogue (§iv) and discuss selected interpretations of it (§v). I
conclude by returning to the Chinese logic dialogue, which frames
my analysis of the happy fish dialogue, in drawing out the herme-
neutic implications (§vi).

II

The Problem of Chinese Logic. What is today the standard Chinese

term for ‘logic’, luójí, was only introduced (as 邏輯) in 1902, al-
though there were all sorts of attempts to translate ‘logic’ into
Chinese from the time of the Jesuit mission in the early seventeenth
century (see Kurtz 2011). But the process of translating Western
works of logic and philosophy only started in earnest at the turn of
the twentieth century, as the Qing dynasty disintegrated. By the time
it finally fell, in 1912, debate was already under way about the rela-
tionship between Western and Chinese forms of thinking.
Central in this debate was the role of logic in ancient Chinese phi-
losophy. Some Chinese scholars sought to show that the various
forms of reasoning recognized in Western logic could be found ex-
emplified in the ancient Chinese texts. There was nothing to com-
pare with the formal logic developed by Aristotle and the Stoics, but
there was certainly concern with argumentation (biàn 辯) and ex-
plicit discussion of names (míng 名). Other scholars were determined
to identify a distinct form of ‘Chinese logic’. All great civilizations, it
was felt, developed some form of logic in their ‘axial age’, as Karl
Jaspers was later to call it. European philosophy had Greek logic,
and Indian philosophy had Buddhist logic, yet there was nothing

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 SWIMMING HAPPILY IN CHINESE LOGIC 357

comparable in Confucianism, and Daoism was seen as hostile to

‘logic’. There was one tradition that had been important in the an-
cient period, however, but which disappeared after China was uni-
fied in the second century bce. This was the Mohist tradition, and it
was to Mohism that scholars looked to find ‘Chinese logic’.

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2.1 Mohism. The Mohist tradition was inspired by the teachings
of Mòzǐ (墨子; c.470–390 bce). The text named after him was com-
piled by his followers, and in the first three parts, in promoting their
key idea of ‘inclusive care’ (jian’ài 兼愛), there is a sustained critique
of Confucianism. Precisely in countering Confucianism, the Mohists
realized that they needed to provide arguments for their claims,
which they set out with great clarity.
It is in the fourth part of the Mòzi, however, that we find the ful-
lest account of Mohist logic. Known as the ‘Dialectics’, this is the
work of the later Mohists, and consists of six books of which the
most relevant for our purposes (Book 45) is the ‘Lesser Selection’
ao qǔ 小取). Mohist logic can be characterized as primarily con-
(xi
cerned with one-step inferences involving the compounding of
names, inferences of the form ‘A is B; so FA is FB’. Some of these
inferences are good, such as ‘white horse is horse; so riding white
horse is riding horse’; some are bad, such as ‘robbers are people; so
caring about robbers is caring about people’ (Mòzi, 45.2b–c). The
Mohists offered no systematic theory of why some such inferences
are good and some bad, but they discussed different kinds of exam-
ples and identified analogies and disanalogies between them.
To give just one illustration, the Mohists held both that robbers
are people and that killing people is wrong, but they also wanted to
allow that killing robbers is right (in certain circumstances). This
might strike us as inconsistent, but on their view, the inference from
‘robbers are people’ to ‘killing robbers is killing people’ is analogous
to the bad inference from ‘robbers are people’ to ‘caring about rob-
bers is caring about people’ (Mòzi, 45.2c). Of course, one way to
claim that killing people is wrong but that killing robbers is not
wrong is to distinguish two kinds of killing, say, ‘murder’ and ‘exe-
cution’: murder is wrong but not execution (cf. Graham 2003,
pp. 488–9; Lai 2017, pp. 150–5). The relevant text makes clear
what is meant by ‘caring about people’ (that is, ‘inclusive care’), on
the basis of which we can reconstruct why they thought that ‘caring
about people’ is a different kind of caring from ‘caring about

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358 MICHAEL BEANEY

robbers’. But the reason that is given for the supposed failure of the
inference in the case of killing robbers is not the ambiguity of ‘kill-
ing’ but simply the analogy to the failure of the inference in the case
of caring about robbers.

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2.2 Analogical Reasoning. The fundamental role of analogical
reasoning in Chinese argumentation comes out most clearly in the
‘Lesser Selection’, which elucidates the Mohist conception of ‘dispu-
tation’ (biàn 辯). The key passage is the following:
Analogy [pì 譬] is mentioning other things and using them to clarify it.
‘Paralleling’ [móu 侔] is placing expressions side by side and jointly
proceeding. ‘Pulling’ [yuán 援] is saying, ‘You are so, how is it that I
alone cannot be so?’ ‘Pushing’ [tui 推] is, on this basis that what they
don’t accept is the same as what they do accept, proposing it. …

Things have respects in which they are the same, yet it doesn’t fol-
low that they are completely the same. Parallels between expressions
are correct only up to a point. When things are so, there is that by
which they are so. Their being so is the same, but that by which they
are so isn’t necessarily the same. When people accept things, there is
that by which they accept them. Their accepting them is the same, but
that by which they accept them isn’t necessarily the same. Thus expres-
sion in analogies, paralleling, pulling, and pushing become different as
they proceed, become dangerous as they change direction, fail when
taken too far, and leave their roots as they flow, and so one cannot fail
to be cautious and cannot invariably use them. (Mòzi, 45.1d–e)

The notions of ‘analogy’, ‘paralleling’, ‘pulling’ and ‘pushing’ can

be illustrated by returning to the example of killing robbers. The
analogy between killing and caring about people is what the
Mohists appeal to in ‘clarifying’ why killing robbers is not wrong.
The inferences involved in this analogy are ‘robbers are people; so
killing robbers is killing people’ and ‘robbers are people; so caring
about robbers is caring about people’. Here there is both a parallel
between ‘robbers are people’ and ‘F-ing robbers is F-ing people’ and
a parallel between the two inferences. Placing them ‘side by side’ is
what constitutes or enables ‘proceeding’ in our disputation.
‘Pulling’ is the literal translation of ‘yuán’ (援), which has also
been translated as ‘adducing’, and here we can imagine someone dis-
agreeing with the Mohists about the analogy between the two infer-
ences. The Mohists challenge them by asking, ‘If you hold that the

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 SWIMMING HAPPILY IN CHINESE LOGIC 359

second inference (concerning caring about robbers) is bad, then how

is it that we cannot hold that the first inference (concerning killing
robbers) is bad too?’ The question is intended to ‘pull’ their oppo-
nent towards their own point of view.
‘Pushing’ is the literal translation of ‘tui’ (推), which has also been
translated as ‘inferring’. Here we can imagine the Mohists arguing

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with their opponent as follows, making explicit what was conversa-
tionally implied in their attempt at ‘pulling’: ‘You hold that the sec-
ond inference is bad; but the first inference is analogous; so you
should accept that the first inference is bad.’ The aim here is to
‘push’ them into accepting what they do not currently accept, in
other words, to infer something from what they do believe.
The second paragraph of the passage cited above shows that the
Mohists recognized the dangers of analogical reasoning. Some anal-
ogies are convincing, some are not, and transitivity soon fails in
chains of such reasoning. So we must always be on the lookout for
failures. The Mohists, among the various philosophical traditions in
ancient China, were the most reflective about this.

2.3 The School of Names. There is one other philosophical tradi-

tion that must also be mentioned in sketching, however briefly,
Chinese logic. This is the so-called School of Names (Míngjia 名家).
Two of its most important representatives were Hui Shi (c.370–310
bce) and Gongsun Long (c.320–250 bce). Both are famous for the
paradoxes they formulated: Hui Shi for his ‘ten theses’, which raise
problems of relativity to perspective, and Gongsun Long for his no-
torious claim that ‘white horse is not horse’ (bái ma fei ma 白馬非
馬). Paradoxes have always been a stimulus to philosophical think-
ing, and these were no exception, motivating the work of the later
Mohists, in particular. As we will see, Hui Shi was also Zhuangzi’s
main sparring partner, taken in the text of the Zhuangzi as the repre-
sentative of the ‘logician’.

2.4 The Answer in Outline. This sketch already suggests an answer

to the problem of Chinese logic. Analogical reasoning, in which one-
step inferences involving the compounding of names play an important
role, is what is characteristic of Chinese argumentation, and reflection
on this lay at the heart of the work of the later Mohists. So there is in-
deed something distinctive about Chinese logic. On the other hand, the
use of analogies throughout ancient Chinese philosophy, and the ways

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360 MICHAEL BEANEY

in which they were accepted or rejected, involve forms of analysis and

reasoning that were not systematically codified. So this is where an un-
derstanding of modern logic can help—to make explicit what was im-
plicit. Taking the happy fish dialogue in the Zhuangzi as our example,
and analysing it in detail, will fill out this answer.

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III

Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish Dialogue. The Zhuangzi (莊子) is

named after Zhu ang Zhou (莊周), who flourished in the later half of
the fourth century bce. Zhuangzi himself has traditionally been taken
as the author of some of the chapters, although his precise contribu-
tion is uncertain. Whoever the author(s) may have been, however,
there is a consistency of view and style across many of the chapters
that makes it appropriate to treat them as a unit and to use the name
‘Zhuangzi’ as a shorthand way of referring to their author(s).

3.1 Perspectivism in the Zhuangzi. Perspectivist, relativist and

sceptical themes pervade the Zhuangzi. Perspectivism can be charac-
terized as the view that all knowledge is perspectival, and Zhuangzi
was (broadly) a perspectivist in this sense: we can only know some-
thing from a particular point of view or within a particular concep-
tual scheme or ethical practice. The key question is whether he also
held that all perspectives are equally valid, which might be taken to
imply relativism and the repudiation of objective knowledge. My
own view is that he refrained from drawing relativist conclusions, al-
though relativist—and sceptical—arguments are deployed through-
out his thinking to combat dogmatism. Arguably, his (epistemologi-
cal) perspectivism is embedded in a broader (metaphysical)
conception of a oneness that underlies and unites the various per-
spectives, on the basis of which Zhuangzi urges us to recognize how
perspectives connect with one another, thereby undermining dogma-
tism. Given the centrality of this idea, I shall describe his core philo-
sophical outlook as connective perspectivism.
The key passage, in this respect, occurs in chapter 2 of the
Zhuangzi, entitled ‘Discourse on Equalizing Things’ (Qí wù lùn 齊
物論), in which Zhuangzi elaborates on his conception of a dào (道).
Often translated as ‘way’ or ‘path’, it can be understood here as any
kind of linguistic or ethical practice. Such daos, he writes, are formed

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 SWIMMING HAPPILY IN CHINESE LOGIC 361

by walking them, and for any such dao, there is thus some perspective
o 所) from which it can be deemed right or acceptable. But he never-
(su
theless stresses that for any given perspectives, there is a dao that con-
nects them into one (dào t ong wéi yi 道通為一; ICS Zhuangzi, 2/5/2).
This is the heart of Zhuangzi’s Daoism. He is a pluralist about daos,

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but he renounces the radical relativism that this might seem to imply by
emphasizing how any one perspective—or rather, the perspective one
inevitably occupies at any one time—opens out into another. It is fine
to occupy that perspective (for appropriate purposes), on Zhuangzi’s
view, but the fear of other, perhaps alien, perspectives is removed—
and dogmatism repudiated—by appreciating how they interconnect.

3.2 The Happy Fish Dialogue. The happy fish dialogue is one of
the most famous stories in Chinese literature. It concludes chapter
17 of the Zhuangzi, which is entitled ‘Autumn Waters’ (Qi u shuǐ 秋
水). Perspectivism is the central theme of this chapter as well, devel-
oped through a series of scenes that might indeed be interpreted as
different perspectives opening up into one another, the realization of
which is what the text itself performs (see Meyer 2015). The final
scene, in which Zhuangzi and Huizi (Hui Shi) engage in an argument
over whether the fish they see are happy, can then be taken as encap-
sulating and expressing Zhuangzi’s connective perspectivism.
The dialogue, though, has generated a range of different interpre-
tations, as we will see in §v. Indeed, the dialogue can itself be read
as raising the problems of interpretation and understanding that be-
devil many areas of philosophy: the problem of other minds, of inter-
species understanding, of multicultural dialogue, of interpreting his-
torical texts, of comparative philosophy, and so on. To adapt a
remark of Wittgenstein’s (2009, p. 233), what we have here is a
whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of dialogue. It also
raises the problem of Chinese logic, and the interpretations I discuss
in §v have been selected to focus on this problem.

3.3 Text and Translation. Here is the text itself, in both Chinese
characters and pinyin, with an English translation.1 The lines have
been numbered, for ease of reference later.

1 The Chinese text is taken from https://ctext.org/zhuangzi/floods-of-autumn; accessed on

21 May 2021. There are minor variations between different versions of the text, but noth-
ing that is significant for present purposes. I add the modern pinyin to help reading, and the
translation is my own (consulting many of the existing translations).

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362 MICHAEL BEANEY

(1) 莊子與惠子遊於濠梁之上。
Zhu angz%K y
u Huìz%K yóu yú háo liáng zhi shàng.
Zhuangzi and Huizi were roaming on the bridge over the
river Hao.

(2) 莊子曰：「儵魚出遊從容, 是魚樂也。」

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angz%K yue: ‘sh
Zhu u yú chu yóu cóng róng, shì yú lè ye.’
Zhuangzi said, ‘Look at the darting fish coming out to
roam around, this is fish happiness.’

(3) 惠子曰：「子非魚, 安知魚之樂？」

Huìz%K yue: ‘z%K fei yú, an zhi yú zhi lè?’
Huizi said, ‘You are not a fish, how do you know
fishes’ happiness?’

(4) 莊子曰：「子非我, 安知我不知魚之樂？」

Zhu o, an zhi w
angz%K yue: ‘z%K fei w o bù zhi yú zhi lè?’
Zhuangzi said, ‘You’re not me, how do you know that I
don’t know fishes’ happiness?’

(5) 惠子曰：「我非子, 固不知子矣；子固非魚也, 子之不知

魚之樂全矣。」
Huìz%K yue: ‘w o fei z%K , gù bù zhi z%K y%K ; z%K gù fei yú ye, z%K
zhi bù zhi yú zhi lè quán y%K .’
Huizi said, ‘I am not you, so certainly don’t know you; you
are certainly not a fish, so the case for your not knowing
fishes’ happiness is complete.’

(6) 莊子曰：「請循其本。子曰『汝安知魚樂』云者, 既已知

吾知之而問我, 我知之濠上也。」
Zhuangz%K yue: ‘qǐng xún qí ben. z%K yue ‘ru an zhi yú lè’
yún zhe, jì y%K zhi wú zhi zhi ér wèn w
o , wo zhi zhi háo
shàng ye.’
Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s go back to the beginning. You said “How
do you know fishes’ happiness?”, in asking me which you al-
ready knew I knew it; I know it from here on the river Hao.’

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 SWIMMING HAPPILY IN CHINESE LOGIC 363

IV

The Happy Fish Dialogue: Conceptual Clarification. There are six

terms that are key to the understanding of the happy fish dialogue,
which I will briefly elucidate to set the stage for discussion of the

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interpretations that follow.

4.1 yóu (遊). ‘yóu’ is one of the most important terms in the
Zhuangzi, being used some ninety-five times. It has the sense of
‘roam’, ‘ramble’, ‘stroll’, ‘wander at ease’, and is used, most notably,
in the title of the very first chapter, ‘xiao yáo yóu (逍遙遊)’, which
can be translated as ‘freely and widely roaming’. The basic idea of
yóu is of a moving around that is unconstrained by any specific pur-
pose. The term is used here for both the roaming of Zhuangzi and
Huizi and the swimming of the fish, the (presumably intended) par-
allel indicating some kind of shared experience, supporting—or at
least anticipating—Zhuangzi’s argument.2

4.2 yú (魚). ‘yú’ is the standard term for fish. Fish are mentioned
around thirty times in the Zhuangzi, more than any other kind of
non-human living being. Of particular significance is the fact that
fish live in water: water is a common metaphor in Chinese literature
for the dao (see esp. Allan 1997). As Franklin Perkins (2015) has ar-
gued, fish play three roles in the Zhuangzi. First, they draw attention
to the limitations of any mode of being or perspective. Fish are
clearly constrained by living in water. Secondly, they illustrate what
it is to be at home in an environment or to inhabit a perspective. Fish
have their own form of life, which is fine for them, though obviously
unsuitable for us as humans. Thirdly, they highlight the problem of
understanding across perspectives. It seems scarcely credible that we
could ever ‘see things’ as a fish does, or ‘know what it’s like’ to be a
fish. It is this third role that is especially relevant here: Huizi repre-
sents the view that there is incommensurability, while Zhuangzi sug-
gests that there is some kind of connection between us.

4.3 lè (樂). ‘lè’, as a noun, means happiness, joy, or enjoyment,

and as an adjective, happy or joyful. The key interpretive question
2 In variants of the text, a related term that has the same pinyin, yóu, but a slightly different

Chinese character, 游, with the water radical (⺡) instead of the walking radical (⻎), is used
for the fishes’ ‘roaming in the water’. But the parallelism remains.

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364 MICHAEL BEANEY

concerns whether ‘happiness’ was understood in ancient China as an

inner state or an embodied activity. Is the question raised by the dia-
logue ‘What is it like to be a happy fish, and how can we know it?’
or ‘What is happy fish activity, and how can we know it?’? If the for-
mer, then we might take Zhuangzi to be stressing the analogy to the

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happiness that he and Huizi are experiencing in their shared roam-
ing. If the latter, then it makes more convincing Zhuangzi’s answer,
‘That is fish happiness’, as he points to the fish that they both see
swimming around below the bridge from where they are looking. The
two questions—and answers—may not be incompatible, however.

4.4 
an (安). ‘
an’, as an interrogative, means ‘how’ or ‘whence’. A
natural translation of ‘an zhi (安知)’ would be ‘How do you know?’
In English, this has two meanings, depending on the emphasis: ‘How
do you know?’ (as in ‘How can you possibly know?’) versus ‘How
do you know?’ (as in ‘How did you come to know?’). The first asks
for justification that what you have is genuine knowledge, and this
seems to be the primary meaning of ‘an zhi’ in the ancient Chinese
texts. The second presupposes that you have knowledge and asks for
clarification of how you acquired that knowledge. In particular, in
its sense of ‘Whence (that is, from where) do you know?’, it requests
specification of location. It is natural that Huizi, as the logician,
should ask for justification, but equally natural that Zhuangzi, as
the Daoist, should be offering clarification—of the relevant perspec-
tive. The interpretative issue concerns the use to which the ambiguity
is put in the text. Is it just a playful pun exemplifying Zhuangzi’s
wit, or is there some more serious purpose? Does he realize that
Huizi has got the better of him and so quickly changes tack, or has
he somehow drawn Huizi into contradicting himself and now shows
him the way out of the fish bottle?

4.5 zhi (知). ‘zhi’ is the central philosophical term in the dialogue.
As a verb it can mean ‘know’, ‘understand’, ‘discern’, or ‘be
acquainted with’, and as a noun ‘knowledge’, ‘wisdom’, or ‘con-
sciousness’. The philologist Duan Yucai (1735–1815) explained the
character ‘知’ as composed of ‘矢’ (shi), meaning arrow, and ‘口’
(kou), meaning mouth, so that ‘知’ means ‘quick-witted’ (see Ames
2015, p. 273). We could gloss this as ‘verbally hitting the target’. As
in the case of ‘happiness’, ‘knowing’ might be construed as less an

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inner (mental) state than an activity—in this case, the activity of us-
ing words correctly, fittingly attuned to the situation. To know what
a ‘fish’ is, for example, is to be able to say ‘fish’ or ‘not-fish’ in the
appropriate circumstances, a form of knowing-how rather than
knowing-that—practical rather than theoretical knowledge. The op-

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position between Zhuangzi and Huizi might then be seen as one be-
tween representatives of different conceptions of knowledge, an op-
position that has taken centre stage in recent debates in
epistemology.
In my view, however, the fixation on knowing-that and knowing-
how distorts our understanding of Chinese philosophy, since it
obscures other conceptions—most notably, that of knowing-as, as I
shall call it.3 The later Mohists define ‘knowing’ (zhi 知) as ‘connect-
ing’ (jie 接), explained as discerning the features of something (Mòzi,
iv, a5), itself understood as recognizing its likeness to an appropri-
ate model or standard (fa 法) for having those features (Mòzi, iv,
a70–1). So what we might describe as knowing that something is X,
or knowing how to name something ‘X’, is conceived by the Mohists
as (known as!) knowing it as X—as like our standard for being X.
Arguably, then, knowing-as is the more fundamental form of know-
ing, in Mohist epistemology, and this fits especially well with
Zhuangzi’s perspectivism.

4.6 ben (本). ‘ben’ means root, origin, beginning, or starting

point. It is translated here as ‘beginning’, since talk of ‘going back to
the beginning’ sounds most natural in English. But it is important to
recognize that its primary sense is ‘root’ or ‘origin’—what we might
indeed call its root meaning. (The Chinese character itself suggests
the idea of a root.) What Zhuangzi is arguably proposing to Huizi is
that they return not just to the starting point of their argument but
to the root experience (or perspective) from which the claimed
knowing flows, an experience—of seeing fish swimming around—
that the two of them shared in roaming together on the bridge.

The Happy Fish Dialogue: Logical Analysis. One interesting feature

of accounts by ‘Western’ philosophers of Chinese ideas and texts is
3 It also obscures the conception of knowing-to, on which see Hetherington and Lai 2015.

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the way in which debates between ‘analytic’ and ‘“continental”’ phi-

losophy are played out.4 Ancient Chinese thought is often taken to be
characterized by greater fluidity in its concepts and less rigour in its
argumentation than is typically deemed acceptable by analytic philos-
ophers. Continental philosophers have tended to see this as a virtue,

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posing challenges to analytic philosophy. But more analytic
approaches to Chinese philosophy also raise issues for analytic philos-
ophy, as there are disputes within analytic philosophy, just as there
are within any philosophical tradition. Indeed, it is important to rec-
ognize that there are disputes within Chinese philosophy, as the happy
fish dialogue itself illustrates. Huizi represents a more analytic strand
in Chinese philosophy, with Zhuangzi’s ideas partly formed in reac-
tion to this. In what follows, I discuss two analytic interpretations that
focus on the logic of the central argument between Zhuangzi and
Huizi, and end by outlining two other readings. But before doing so I
shall briefly survey some of the broadly continental ones.

5.1 ‘Continental’ Interpretations. Of all the ancient Chinese phil-

osophical texts, the Zhuangzi is by far the most playful—in the sto-
ries that are told and in the dazzling inventiveness of the language
used. It is unsurprising, then, that what I call ‘playful’ interpretations
of the happy fish dialogue are quite popular. One example is that of-
fered by Hans-Georg Moeller (2015), who makes a great deal of the
play on the ambiguity of ‘an zhi’ (‘How do you know?’) and ‘yóu’
(‘roam’), as used for both fish and humans. The dialogue, he sug-
gests, should primarily be seen as just an enjoyable illustration—or
parody—of the ‘intellectual ramblings’ of philosophers.
Daoism has a religious as well as philosophical dimension, and
there are ‘mystical’ readings of the dialogue too. Eske Janus
Møllgaard (2005), for example, has argued that Zhuangzi’s sponta-
neous exclamation, ‘That is the joy of fish!’, records a mystical expe-
rience of ‘pure coming-into-being’, reflecting his own realization of
the joy of life that arises in ‘roaming’. Hans Peter Hoffmann (2015),
by contrast, has interpreted this exclamation as expressing delight in

4 I dislike talk of the supposed “divide” between ‘analytic’ and ‘“continental’” philosophy
(with the number of scare quotes reflecting my degree of discomfort; cf. Beaney 2017, 124).
But the terms—like ‘Western’—are so established that they remain a convenient shorthand
for a contrast that has some applicability to understanding Chinese philosophy. So I will
only occasionally put them in scare quotes to remind us of the caution needed in using
these terms.

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the joy of language, offering what he himself calls a ‘literary’ read-

ing, emphasizing Zhuangzi’s celebration of the richness and fluidity
of language.
A more substantial interpretation is provided by Roger Ames
(2015), which we can call ‘contextualist’ not just in providing con-

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text to the dialogue but also in articulating a contextualist concep-
tion of knowledge. Knowing, as Ames describes it, is holistic, per-
spectival, collaborative and situated: ‘For Zhuangzi, knowing,
rather than being a true idea in the mind of some isolated experi-
encer, is always proximate as the quality of a particular, situated ex-
perience’ (2015, pp. 281, 285). The idea of knowing as a shared ex-
perience is also developed in the ‘phenomenological’ interpretation
elaborated by two Japanese scholars, Toshio Kuwako (2015) and
Takahiro Nakajima (2015). Experience, Nakajima argues, ‘must be
open to what is not itself’ (2015, p. 173), and what Zhuangzi
reminds Huizi of at the end of their dialogue is their openness to one
another in their roaming together, which reflects Zhuangzi’s open-
ness to the embodied happy experience of the fish.
All these interpretations enrich our understanding of the dialogue
and its broader context. But they are all open to one major objec-
tion: they offer no analysis or evaluation of the argument between
Zhuangzi and Huizi. So let us turn to the two analytic
interpretations.

5.2 Hansen’s Analysis. The most detailed reconstruction of the

argument in the happy fish dialogue, drawing on the resources of
modern analytic philosophy, has been offered by Chad Hansen
(2003). On his account, Zhuangzi and Huizi agree in what he calls
their perspectival relativism, their disagreement lying in how to for-
mulate its implications: ‘The issue is not simply ‘does Zhuangzi
know?’ but ‘what is the appropriate standard of attributing knowl-
edge?’’ (2003, p. 54). Their respective views and favoured standards
are not stated explicitly in the dialogue, however, so have to be
teased out inferentially, by attending to what is needed to make sense
of the moves in the argument. Hansen’s analysis takes up eight pages
(pp. 56–63), interweaving logical analysis with philosophical and lin-
guistic clarifications. Since some of the latter has already been pro-
vided, let me reconstruct his reconstruction as succinctly as I can to

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bring out the logic of the argument, as he interprets it, under his own
four headings, which correspond to lines 2 to 5 of the dialogue.5
1 See the fish swimming at leisure (Zhuangzi)
From seeing the fish swimming around, Zhuangzi asserts:

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(f) This is fish happiness.

(f) could be interpreted in one of three ways:

(F1) This is what it is like to be a happy fish.

(F2) These fish are happy.

(F3) This is happy fish activity.

(f1) opens up Nagel-style scepticism (how do you know what it is

like to be a happy fish?), (f2) yields traditional ‘other minds’ scepti-
cism (how do you know that fish are happy?), and (f3) suggests a
more ‘direct’ report and makes Zhuangzi’s later ‘return to the root’
more plausible.

2 How do you know? (Huizi)

In asking Zhuangzi how he knows fishes’ happiness, Huizi invokes
the following conversational norm:
(c) In asserting something, one should be prepared to respond to a challenge
of ‘How do you know?’

Huizi’s challenge to Zhuangzi’s assertion is made after asserting

something himself, namely, that Zhuangzi is not a fish. The implica-
tion is that there is a principle from which it then follows that
Zhuangzi does not know fishes’ happiness. Let us formulate this
principle in a schematic form:
(p) One must be X to know X’s F.

This schema can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on

what the ‘X’ and ‘F’ stand for. As far as the dialogue is concerned, the
relevant (partial) instantiations, formulated as two pairs, are (pn) and
(pk), interpreting the ‘X’, and (pa) and (pc), interpreting the ‘F’:
5 In the interests of brevity I also omit all relativizing phrases such as ‘on Hansen’s account’

that would remind us at regular intervals that the reconstruction is presented from
Hansen’s perspective—at least, to the extent that I can inhabit that perspective, which I am
confident I can.

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(pn) One must be N to know N’s F, where ‘N’ names a particu-

lar individual.
(pk) One must be of kind K to know N’s F, where ‘N’ names any indi-
vidual of kind K.
(pa) One must be X to know X’s affective state.

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(pc) One must be X to know X’s cognitive state.

All that is needed to derive Huizi’s conclusion that Zhuangzi does

not know fishes’ happiness is (pk) and (pa), combined as (pka):
(pka) One must be of kind K to know N’s affective state, where ‘N’ names
any individual of kind K.

With the kind K here being fish, and the affective state being happi-
ness, we then have the following specific instantiation:
(pfh) One must be a fish to know fishes’ happiness.

Since Zhuangzi is not a fish, it therefore follows by (pfh) that

Zhuangzi cannot know fishes’ happiness.

3 How do you know I don’t know? (Zhuangzi)

In Zhuangzi’s first response to Huizi’s challenge, he does not answer
directly by giving his grounds for claiming to know fishes’ happi-
ness. He counterattacks—by accepting both (c), in challenging
Huizi’s own assertion, as well as (p), interpreted as combining (pn)
and (pc), which can be formulated as follows:
(pnc) One must be N to know N’s cognitive state, where ‘N’ names a par-
ticular individual.

Zhuangzi correctly asserts that Huizi is not Zhuangzi, in which case

it follows by (pnc) that Huizi cannot know Zhuangzi’s cognitive
state. So Huizi cannot know that Zhuangzi doesn’t know
fishes’ happiness.
The crucial move that Zhuangzi makes here is to interpret (p) in a
stronger form than was needed by Huizi to derive his implied claim
that Zhuangzi doesn’t know fishes’ happiness. This is the trap that
Zhuangzi sets, which Huizi falls into.

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4 Right! Not being you, I don’t know you; you, not being fish, don’t
know fish—that is the whole of it! (Huizi)
Huizi accepts both Zhuangzi’s correct assertion that Huizi is not
Zhuangzi as well as (pnc), the stronger version of (p). Indeed, given
that he has already accepted (pa), albeit as combined with (pk), we

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can see him as endorsing the even stronger principle:
(pnac) One must be N to know N’s state, whether affective or cognitive,
where ‘N’ names a particular individual.

From (pnac) it then follows that Huizi doesn’t know any of

Zhuangzi’s states, whether affective or cognitive—that is, in short,
that he simply doesn’t know Zhuangzi.
However, it is at this point that Huizi oversteps, falling into
Zhuangzi’s trap. He thought he had trapped Zhuangzi, by getting
him to agree to the principle (p), and in an even stronger form than
was needed. Happy with himself, he simply turns his original rhetor-
ical question (‘You are not a fish, how do you know fishes’ happi-
ness?’) into an (enthymatic) argument (‘You are certainly not a fish,
so the case for your not knowing fishes’ happiness is complete’),
with the principle that governs this argument now accepted by
Zhuangzi. The problem is that the conclusion of this argument, that
Zhuangzi does not know fishes’ happiness, as asserted by Huizi,
conflicts with Huizi’s assertion that he doesn’t know Zhuangzi. If
Huizi is held to (c), the conversational norm that they have both
also endorsed, then he has to show that he knows both that he
doesn’t know Zhuangzi and that Zhuangzi does not know fishes’
happiness; but the former rules out knowing the latter. (Both asser-
tions might be true, but Huizi cannot claim to know both.) His hap-
piness evaporating, Huizi is snared by his own trap.

5.3 Hansen’s Evaluation. There is more in Hansen’s analysis

than I have just reconstructed. He also argues that there is a conflict
between Huizi’s implicit acceptance of knowledge by inference, in
the use he makes of principle (p), and his endorsement of (p) in its
strongest form, that is, (pnac), which Hansen calls the inner-
perspective principle (2003, p. 62), which can be stated as follows:
(ipp) One can only know something from one’s own first-person, sub-
jective perspective.

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There may or may not be such a conflict in Huizi’s thinking, but it is

irrelevant to the trap that is sprung, and unnecessarily complicates
the analysis.
Hansen’s diagnosis of what goes on in the final line of the dia-
logue can also be simplified. Having caught Huizi in a trap,

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Zhuangzi then offers him a way out by going back to the beginning.
There is no verbal trickery on Zhuangzi’s part, only a helping hand.
Huizi’s challenge of ‘How do you know?’ had been issued in the con-
text of implicit acceptance of (p), understood in some form. But hav-
ing led Huizi into contradicting himself, the question can be asked
again without inferentially assuming (p). How does Zhuangzi know
fish happiness? From here on the river Hao, where Huizi is too—
and hence in a position to know just what Zhuangzi knows. It was
Huizi’s adherence to (p) that had blocked him from recognizing this,
and once that obstacle is removed, the way is open for him to accept
that Zhuangzi does indeed know fish happiness.
Of course, Huizi may still refuse the helping hand. (The dialogue
does not end: ‘Of course, Zhuangzi, I now see that you are abso-
lutely right. You must know how happy I am!’) As Hansen points
out, there are two other ways that Huizi could escape from the trap.
One is to accept only the weaker form of (p), as represented by (pk)
rather than (pn): he can know Zhuangzi’s states, since he is human
himself; but no human can know fishes’ states. The other way is to
refrain from asserting that he knows that Zhuangzi does not know
fishes’ happiness. He should remain agnostic. Hansen suggests that
Huizi errs in drawing absolutist conclusions from his relativism (pp.
63, 65, 70–2). Before we can assess this, however, we need to con-
sider another logical analysis of the argument, according to which
Huizi comes out better.

5.4 Teng’s Analysis. Rather than analysing the argument between

Huizi and Zhuangzi inferentially, as Hansen does, Norman Teng
(2006) has suggested that it is best analysed in Mohist terms, draw-
ing on the ‘Lesser Selection’.
As we saw in §2.2, paralleling is defined as ‘placing expressions
side by side and jointly proceeding’. Teng notes that there are two
parallel patterns in the dialogue:
(p1) X is not Y; whence does X know the state Y is in?
(p2) X is not Y, so X does not know the state Y is in.

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(p1) is used in Zhuangzi’s first response to Huizi’s challenge, in lines

3 and 4 of the dialogue:
Huizi: You are not a fish; whence do you know fish happiness?
Zhuangzi: You are not me; whence do you know that I don’t know
fish happiness?

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Here we have paralleling together with adducing (‘pulling’). ‘If you
can question how I know fish happiness, then I can question how
you know that I don’t know fish happiness?’ is what Zhuangzi is ad-
ducing in this case, in throwing the challenge back at Huizi.
(p2) is used in Huizi’s response to this counter-challenge, in line 5
of the dialogue:
I am not you, so I don’t know you.
You are not a fish, so you don’t know fish happiness.

Here we have paralleling together with inferring (‘pushing’). From

Zhuangzi’s counter-challenge, Huizi is assuming that Zhuangzi
would accept his first argument (‘I am not you, so I don’t know
you’) as well as the premiss of the second argument (‘You are not a
fish’), and hence, given the parallel, would be led to infer what he
had earlier refused to accept (‘You don’t know fish happiness’).
On Teng’s account, then, Zhuangzi’s first response to Huizi is ‘a
combined exercise of parallelizing and adducing rather than a con-
trived, logical trap’, and Huizi’s counter-response is ‘a combined ex-
ercise of parallelizing and inferring rather than a mishandling of the
dialectic’ (Teng 2006, p. 134). From the perspective of Mohist logic,
he writes, ‘debating is a joint enterprise. It entails an exchange of the
debaters’ views, and demands that those who are engaging in a de-
bate consistently align what they themselves approve or disapprove
of with what is to be demanded of the others’ (2006, p. 134).
With this in mind, Teng criticizes Hansen’s account of the attribu-
tion to Huizi of the inner-perspective principle—(pnac) or (ipp), as
formulated above. As Teng notes, Huizi’s initial challenge only
invokes the weaker, species-relativist principle—(pka). On the
species-relativist view, we cannot know the affective or cognitive
states of members of other species, but we may know those of mem-
bers of our own species, namely, other humans. But what Zhuangzi
tries to do, as we have seen, is get Huizi to endorse the stronger prin-
ciple (pnac), which we can now describe Zhuangzi as doing by

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paralleling. Consider the two key arguments (substituting for

the indexicals):
(ZF) Zhuangzi is not a fish, so doesn’t know fish happiness.

(HZ) Huizi is not Zhuangzi, so doesn’t know Zhuangzi’s (affective or

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cognitive) states.

Huizi implicitly appeals to (zf) in his initial challenge, while

Zhuangzi implicitly appeals to (hz) in his counter-challenge. But if
Zhuangzi is right in paralleling and inferring from (zf) to (hz), then
Huizi is no less right in paralleling and inferring back from (hz) to
(zf). In other words, if it is right to ‘derive’ (pnac) from (pka), then
it is no less right to ‘derive’ (pka) from (pnac). ‘Paralleling’ suggests
that they are ‘equivalent’. Zhuangzi and Huizi are cooperating in
establishing this purported equivalence. But if this is so, then
Zhuangzi should agree that he doesn’t know fish happiness.
The problem, of course, is that Huizi cannot consistently assert
the conclusions in (zf) and (hz), and if Zhuangzi and Huizi are in-
deed ‘aligning’ themselves in their debate, then they will both recog-
nize this. What this therefore shows is that the paralleling is faulty.
And this is the final insight into the dialogue that Teng provides
from the perspective of Mohist logic. For as we saw in §2.2, the
Mohists were clear about the dangers of analogical reasoning.
Zhuangzi and Huizi were presumably aware of this too, and would
not have been surprised that their paralleling leads to contradiction.
This then motivates Zhuangzi’s going back to the ‘root’, which Teng
accepts is a ‘trick’ but one which should now be seen as ‘a device for
reorienting oneself to a different viewpoint and asking oneself
whether one knew it all along’ (2006, p. 137).
Reading the dialogue from the perspective of Mohist logic does in-
deed help make sense of the form that Zhuangzi’s and Huizi’s rea-
soning takes. What is absent in both the dialogue and the ‘Lesser
Selection’, however, is any diagnosis of where such paralleling goes
wrong. Zhuangzi just returns to the ‘root’, and few resources are
provided in Mohist logic (at least in what survives) for assessment:
the Mohists simply identified (supposedly) good and bad cases of
paralleling, without any systematic account of what made good
cases good and bad cases bad. Teng suggests that once we recognize
the paralleling in the dialogue, ‘Hui Shi’s response is both elegant
and powerful from an ancient Chinese dialectical viewpoint’ (2006,

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p. 135). But it is nevertheless flawed, and Teng’s appeal to Mohist

logic is insufficient for analysing the dialogue. We need to recognize
that (ipp) is a stronger and more problematic principle than (pka),
and that an option remains for Huizi to retreat to species-relativism.

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5.5 The Species-Relativist Interpretation. What the logical analy-
sis just given, drawing on both modern and Mohist logic, thus opens
up is the space for a perspective that judges neither Zhuangzi nor
Huizi as the ‘winner’. Confirmation of this is provided by the ‘spe-
cies-relativist’ interpretation that has recently been advanced by Lea
Cantor (2020). On her reading, Zhuangzi’s and Huizi’s shared expe-
rience in roaming together and their looking at the fish from the
same location shows the possibility of their knowing one another’s
states, but ‘we have no idea whether the happiness of fish would
amount to anything outside our human purview’, as she puts it
(2020, p. 226). Once the stronger principle—(pnac) or (ipp)—is
shown to lead to contradiction, then the way is open for Huizi to
recognize, with Zhuangzi, that what knowledge he has of fish happi-
ness comes only from our human perspective. It is not being in the
relevant state that is important, but having a certain perspective.
On both Hansen’s and Cantor’s interpretations, then, Zhuangzi is
seen as exposing an assumption that blocks Huizi from appreciating
what (human) knowledge of fish happiness is. But unlike Hansen,
Cantor takes the dialogue as supporting species-relativism, not a
stronger individual-relativism that just refrains from drawing abso-
lutist claims. And this means that a better response to Zhuangzi’s
counter-challenge was available to Huizi than the one he actually
made. He could have retreated to the species-relativist principle in-
ferentially invoked in his initial challenge, and hence found common
ground with Zhuangzi. Perhaps that is what was intended in
Zhuangzi’s talk of going back to the ‘root’: Zhuangzi and Huizi
were indeed on common ground, looking at the fish, and Huizi did
indeed know fish happiness in just the same way as Zhuangzi—
whatever exactly that knowledge amounts to.

5.6 The Connective Perspectivist Interpretation. My own view is

that Zhuangzi is not himself a species-relativist, at least about happy
activity, even if Huizi is (charitably interpreted). The whole setting
of the dialogue suggests a parallel between the fishes’ happy activity
and the happy roaming of Zhuangzi and Huizi, and what Zhuangzi

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tries to do in the final line is to get Huizi to recognize the analogy: he

can know happy fish activity as like their own happy human activity,
taken as the standard. Their shared perspective and the ‘perspective’
of the fish open up to one another to the extent that there is this un-
derlying similarity.

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If this is right, then the deeper argument is implicit in the framing
of the ‘logical’ dispute between Zhuangzi and Huizi, and here we
might return to the contrast between knowing-that and knowing-as
drawn in §4.5. Huizi interprets Zhuangzi as claiming to know that
the fish are happy, but the attempts to justify this—or its negation—
break down. So perhaps we should indeed switch to a conception of
knowing-as, with corresponding modesty about claims to knowl-
edge. Reflecting his perspectivism, Zhuangzi only claims to know
fish happiness to the extent that it is like his and Huizi’s happiness,
to which attention is drawn in the careful construction of the happy
fish dialogue. Like all analogies, however, this may or may not be
convincing, so perhaps in the end the dialogue simply expresses the
basic problem of Mohist logic, concerning the evaluation of analogi-
cal and parallel reasoning. (“The softness of the analogical must.”)
There may be no compulsion, but only an invitation to connect.

VI

The Dialogues as Analogues. Let’s go back to the beginning—the

Chinese logic dialogue. Is the argument in the text that we have been
considering—the happy fish dialogue—cleverly argued? This is the
implication of both the logical analyses we considered, even if the ar-
gument needs considerable unpacking. But can it only really be
judged so from the perspective of a Chinese logician, as Hugh
claims? In other words, generalizing, can a text only be analysed—
and the arguments evaluated—using the logical resources that we
can reasonably assume that the author of the text had at their dis-
posal? ‘Yes’ seems to be Teng’s answer in his dispute with Hansen.
But, at least from my hermeneutic perspective, this seems wrong.
Knowing what kinds of reasoning were used at the time, both implic-
itly and explicitly, is important for understanding any text, but the
core of philosophical understanding is evaluation of the arguments,
and in this respect neither Teng’s nor the ‘continental’ readings we
considered do this. We need to draw on modern logic, which

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provides resources for dealing with a wide range of our inferen-

tial practices.
Of course, applying any logic only works if the relevant forms of
reasoning and principles inferentially invoked are at least implicit in
the text (or context). As I reconstructed Hansen’s analysis, this is ar-

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guably the case, although I would offer Huizi, more charitably, the
retreat to the weaker, species-relativist principle that the analysis it-
self opened up. Most importantly, though, the kind of analysis that
Hansen provides enables us to evaluate the argument. As we have
seen, and this is where appreciation of Mohist logic does come in,
analogical reasoning can easily lead us astray, which is precisely
what happens in the argument between Zhuangzi and Huizi, as both
of them implicitly recognize. But we need other forms of logic to
identify and diagnose what goes wrong.
So is Joanne right? There are many ways of judging that something
is cleverly argued. The continental readings we considered also make
this judgement, but they do so by appreciating how the argument be-
tween Zhuangzi and Huizi is framed. The shared experience that
Zhuangzi and Huizi are having comes out in the setting of the dia-
logue and the deliberate choice of words, which might be regarded as
an implicit or ‘silent’ argument, which the reader is meant to make
explicit or voice for themselves.6 So too, in the Chinese logic dialogue,
it is relevant that Joanne and Hugh are discussing the passage to-
gether. It is through their discussion, assumed to involve conceptual
and logical analysis—in other words, through the operation of their
shared reason—that understanding of the relevant argument is
achieved, just as the analysis of the happy fish dialogue offered in the
present text is achieved through engagement with other interpreters
and in response to actual comments on earlier versions and imagined
criticisms by later readers. And this suggests a hermeneutic principle
that is thoroughly Zhuangzian. Any interpreter must be open to as
many different readings as possible. Each reading offers something,
and we must endeavour to see how they connect with one another, as
illustrated in the way that the interpretations were presented in §v.
My analysis of the happy fish dialogue has been framed by discus-
sion of the problem of Chinese logic highlighted by the Chinese logic
dialogue. The parallelism between the dialogues achieves two

6 I am grateful to Dirk Meyer for drawing my attention to what he calls ‘silent’ argumenta-

tion in ancient Chinese philosophy.

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 SWIMMING HAPPILY IN CHINESE LOGIC 377

connected aims. The happy fish dialogue offers an instructive case study
by means of which to think through and resolve the problem of
Chinese logic. The Chinese logic dialogue provides a setting that brings
both Mohist and modern logic into play in analysing the argument be-
tween Zhuangzi and Huizi, and appreciating the contribution they

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jointly make in understanding the happy fish dialogue. Mohist and
modern logic offer different perspectives on the text: they both help
open up the argumentation, but each one also opens out into the other.
Analogies encourage a form of perspectival thinking in which we
roam between different perspectives in enriching our understanding
of what it is that they are perspectives on. We construct our world
through analogies, and the wider we roam in drawing them, the
richer our thinking. At the core of Mohist logic is the idea that some-
thing is (deemed) what it is in being like something else that is our
standard in this respect. The root form of knowing for the Mohists
is knowing-as—knowing something as like something else. If analo-
gies are turtles, then it’s turtles all the way down. And this is
reflected in Zhuangzi’s view that knowing fish happiness is knowing
it as like his and Huizi’s happiness. Analogy lies at the heart—the
xin (心)—of Chinese thinking, and we can enrich our own thinking
by exploring analogies and parallels with Chinese philosophy and
using logic to unpack and evaluate them. Analogies, both explicit
and implicit, saturate the text you read before you, and I hope their
felicity is manifest. How do you know this felicity? You know it
from your happily swimming around in the text.7

School of Divinity, History and Philosophy

King’s College
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen AB24 3DS,
UK
[email protected]

7 For written comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Marco Achinger, Roland Bolz,

Waldemar Brys, Nick Bunnin, Lea Cantor, Ningyu Fang, Yael Gazit, Yuchen Guo, Brad
Hall, Chad Hansen, Eva Henke, Jing Huang, Asher Jiang, Yi Jiang, Oscar Joffe, Andreas
Kerschbaum, Louis Kohlmann, Martha Kunicki, Karyn Lai, Xiaolan Liang, Guy
Longworth, Sharon Macdonald, Adrian Marriott, Dirk Meyer, Carlo Penco, Tom
Raysmith, Matthias Statzkowski, Hamid Taieb, Shuchen Xiang, and Xinkan Zhao. I also
thank audiences at the Universities of Leipzig, Aberdeen, and Bamberg, at King’s College
London and the Humboldt University, and at the (online) talks I gave to the Scots
Philosophical Association and the Aristotelian Society, for felicitous discussion.

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378 MICHAEL BEANEY

Institut für Philosophie

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
Berlin 10099
Germany

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Department of Philosophy
Tsinghua University
Beijing
China

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