The idea that clarity about language is important is very familiar indeed in the Western philosophical tradition. (“It all depends what you mean by …” is pretty much a paradigmatic, or even caricatural, philosopher’s utterance.) It sounds as if the Confucian notion has a rather different spin on it—focusing on terminology related to social relationships, with the idea that fixing the terminology will lead to fixing the relationships—and a bunch of related assumptions not highly favoured among Western analytic philosophers—but I can’t help thinking there’s maybe a core of shared ideas there.
It is very possible that I’m overoptimistically reading too much into the terminology, though. Would any Confucian experts like to comment?
The idea that clarity about language is important is very familiar indeed in the Western philosophical tradition. (“It all depends what you mean by …” is pretty much a paradigmatic, or even caricatural, philosopher’s utterance.) It sounds as if the Confucian notion has a rather different spin on it—focusing on terminology related to social relationships, with the idea that fixing the terminology will lead to fixing the relationships—and a bunch of related assumptions not highly favoured among Western analytic philosophers—but I can’t help thinking there’s maybe a core of shared ideas there.
It is very possible that I’m overoptimistically reading too much into the terminology, though. Would any Confucian experts like to comment?