Understanding in the Xunzi and epistemology

Abstract

In the Xúnzǐ, numerous passages depict the sage’s and gentleman’s understanding with distinctive epistemic and practical values compared with knowledge. At the same time, in contemporary Western epistemology, there are surging attentions towards the concept of understanding as a kind of epistemic state different from knowledge. The aim of this dissertation is to discuss Xúnzǐ’s conception of understanding, to compare Xúnzǐ’s account with a variety of accounts of understanding in Western epistemology, and, to propose, in the context of contemporary epistemological discussion, a novel account of understanding which is inspired by Xúnzǐ’s account. Chapter II discusses two accounts of understanding in western epistemology, namely ‘the achievement account’ and ‘the manipulationist account’. Both accounts have their problems in explaining the nature of understanding. While the former needs to provide a clear explanation of the psychology of understanding, the latter fails to provide an adequate account to cover different cases of understanding. Chapter III mentions two views of understanding in philosophy of science which are helpful for my interpretation of Xúnzǐ’s account of understanding. The focus turns to Xúnzǐ’s epistemology in Chapter IV, including his accounts of knowledge and understanding. For Xúnzǐ, the object of knowledge and understanding is a system of kinds. I discuss the notion of the system of kinds, based on which I show that Xúnzǐ’s explains knowledge in terms of competence in drawing distinctions between kinds, while understanding as a grasp of the whole system of kinds is associated with an excellent level of competence in recognizing kinds and responding to kinds in action. I contend that Xúnzǐ’s approach to explaining the relationship between understanding and cognitive competence is similar to a virtue epistemologist approach. In the end, I propose a virtue epistemologist account of understanding inspired by Xúnzǐ’s account. Based on this novel account of understanding, I argue that the concept of understanding is different from the concept of knowledge, and the former should be considered as a further focus in epistemology in addition to the latter.