Thursday, September 30, 2010

Guidance and constraint

‘Guidance and constraint’ is easy enough to enunciate; it is far less easy to make the hypothesis usefully determinate or to work out what types of linguistic phenomena should count as evidence pro or contra. ‘Guidance’ takes two forms. In its first form, where the relativist perceives success, a feature of linguistic structure will be invoked
which either strongly encourages or, more commonly, at least enables the discovery of philosophical truth. In its second form, where philosophy goes ‘wrong’, we have ‘misguidance’; for example the reification of linguistic detail deemed not to correspond with reality. ‘Constraint’ can overlap with ‘misguidance’, but is usually invoked to 4 Some, if not all, of the scholars to be discussed critically in the sequel might very well object that I have grossly misrepresented them at the outset: since they differ so sharply over basic issues in the interpretation of Chinese philosophy and language, they can hardly constitute a real ‘group’. What I shall seek to demonstrate is that adherence to ‘the guidance and constraint hypothesis’ constitutes a problematic methodological unity more fundamental than the level on which they part company.

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