What Is Philosophical Concern with Truth? A Cross-Cultural Examination

Bo Mou

The concern with truth has been considered as one perennial central concern in philosophy. Such concern has been identified as its conscious endeavor to explicitly, directly, and systematically answer various truth-or-'true'-related questions, 'What is truth?' or 'What is the function of the truth predicate?' among others, in meta-discourse, resulting in various theories or accounts of truth. Judged by this, though the issue of truth has been one primary concern throughout the history of Western philosophy, it appears that traditional Chinese philosophy is not concerned with truth. For, in traditional Chinese philosophy, there appears neither conscious investigation of truth in meta-discourse nor conscious 'semantic ascent' examination of the function, and its philosophical relevance, of the truth predicate. In this paper, I intend to show the following points. (1) The 'incumbent' understanding of the identity of the philosophical concern with truth is seriously limited, and some other characteristic approach to the issue of truth has been ignored, i.e., a recessive approach on the track of quietist attitude towards the issue of truth, which was implicitly taken for granted in traditional Chinese philosophy. (2) Different from the representative manifest approach of quietist perspective as well as other perspectives in Western philosophy, the quietist approach in traditional Chinese philosophy is characterized in terms of the Dao-following orientation. (3) A moral, consistent with one recent deflationary point, can be drawn from this cross-cultural examination that the concept of truth is not identical with an ontological concept but minimally ontologically committed; an adequate concept of truth that captures our prethoeretic understanding of truth is ontologically neutral regarding various ontological and metaphysical elaborations of the nature of reality. (4) Nevertheless, in contrast to deflationary argument, the concept of truth and the concern with truth, as suggested in the case of traditional Chinese philosophy, is not necessarily connected with a certain logico-syntactic function (if any) of the truth predicate and so cannot be characterized in terms of such a function of the truth predicate.