A Radically Holistic Epistemology:

Knowledge and Action in Wang Yang-ming

Crispin Sartwell

I.

Western epistemology has been impoverished by two mutually dependent assumptions. I will term these 'cognitivism' and 'textualism'. They underlie specific epistemological theories and drive them in certain directions. Both are forms of fragmentation; cognitivism isolates a "knowing subject" within a human or social body, and 'textualism' isolates a certain sort of "object of knowledge" within the body of the world. With the aid of the holistic epistemology of the neo-Confucian thinker Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529), I aim to make these assumptions explicit and throw them into question.

'Cognitivism,' as the term will be used here, refers to the view that one can isolate a reflective faculty or aspect of persons from the affective and active aspects of human life. One desires or acts or perceives, on this view, but one also reflects on what one has desired or done or perceived; affect, action, and perception yield material over which reflection performs its various cognitive operations. It is only from such operations that the possibility of knowledge emerges. This view depends traditionally on a distinction between "raw data" and the reason which organizes this data in a conceptual taxonomy and renders it into propositions, conceived as the objects of propositional attitudes and bearers of truth value. Some contemporary versions of cognitivism, however, dispense with the distinction between raw and cooked data altogether, and declare that the "data" enter consciousness as always already interpreted. Such views seek to cognitivize experience from top to bottom, but they also compromise traditional versions of reflection as being an emotionally arid zone within the person. Indeed, many such views seek to make the agent of cognition not an individual at all, but a socially articulated form of life. Typically, they speak not of reflection but of interpretation.

We are, obviously, proceeding on the level of stupidly huge generalities. But the point I want to make about cognitivism is that it seeks to make knowledge the province of, as it were, a specialist within the body or within the social body. Knowledge here is conceived of as a right reflection or as a useful interpretation; it only becomes possible in an isolation of the reflective or interpretive activity from the full-bore situation of the organism as it moves through the world. Knowledge is located at the level of a secondary operation which the animal derives from a process of casting world, experience, data into comprehensible form, or from a process of bringing a comprehensible form to the articulation of the world.

'Textualism' lends cognitivism a particular content. The claim here is that knowledge emerges in an operation over texts, linguistic forms that reflect the world or are brought to the activity of interpreting it. These are the proper "objects of knowledge." The knowing subject, singular or social, is conceived as a hermeneut engaged in the project of arranging linguistic items for the purpose of comprehending experience or the purpose of making comprehensible experiences. Knowledge is conceived as a relation to truth, but this relation is mediated through the proposition as the "bearer of truth value," or through the narrative as a construction that makes truth available. That is, knowledge is conceived fundamentally as linguistic. One knows that the moon is not made of green cheese, which is to say that one knows the proposition 'the moon is not made of green cheese' to be true. Alternatively, we construct the knowledge that the moon is not made of green cheese in the construction of narratives in which the claim that the moon is made of green cheese is inadmissable or incomprehensible, narratives bound up with theories of planetary bodies, the sciences of gouda, and so forth. Either way, knowledge is conceived as an operation over linguistic units or whole languages, or as a relation of such units and languages to a world and to other linguistic units or languages.

For example, the traditional characterization of knowledge within the analytic tradition has it that knowledge is "justified true belief." Propositions or sentences or statements bear truth value, usually conceived as a relation of correspondence to the relevant bit of the world. What is known is not the world itself (though in common parlance we often say that we know things, and never say that we know propositions), but the reflection of the world in the proposition. Justification is conceived to be a relation of the target proposition to further propositions, propositions that provide evidence or argument for the target proposition. Thus, the knower is conceived of as a zone of inscription; in the knower, propositions appear; in the relations of these propositions, justification inheres; in the relation of these propositions to the facts lies their truth. This yields a certain way of filling out the content of cognitivism; these operations over propositions are the cognitive operations, whereas operations of the body that do not primarily concern propositions - operations such as ingestion, assault, locomotion, orgasm - may be informed by the cognitive but do not constitute it. Knowing thus conceived occurs in physical spaces in which such other operations can be minimized, and in which the linguistic items can be devised and perused and inscribed on persons in isolation from full normal contexts of activity: libraries, studies, classrooms, prisons, laboratories and so forth.

Or we may seek to liquidate these other operations and the environment in which they occur into the order of language from the get-go, to immolate ingestion, assault, locomotion, orgasm into language. Hence we either expand or annihilate the cognitive altogether; there is nothing for our experience that stands outside the order or disorder of language. Materiality is itself linguistic (which will here also mean "social"). Knowledge would then occur wholly within a language game. This brings knowledge back into the full-scale context of human life, only it "cognitivizes" that context from the outset.

I would like to suggest that, first, knowledge is not primarily a cognitive matter, and that, second, it is not only an operation in the order or disorder of language.

II.

Wang Yang-ming made two radical identifications: first, of knowledge with action, and second, of action with affect. Wang is most famous for holding that knowledge (chih) and action (hsing) are identical or "one," though his own statement of the doctrine is not quite that extreme.

Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action in its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge. At bottom the tasks of knowledge and action cannot be separated. . . . Knowledge is what constitutes action and unless it is acted on it cannot be called knowledge. (Wang, p. 93)

One acts at once in order to know and because one knows: act and knowledge coincide. [The similarity of this doctrine to the epistemology of classical American pragmatism is obvious. See, e.g. Dewey, chapter 1.]

Wang explicitly rejects the cognitivist notion that knowledge arises from reflection or contemplation. The epistemology he attacks was associated with Chu Hsi, Wang's neo-Confucian precursor. When he was very young, Wang read Chu Hsi's doctrine of the investigation of things, and tried to learn about bamboo by sitting and staring at a bamboo plant with one of his friends. His friend became ill after three days and left, but Wang held on for an entire week, looking at the bamboo. When he was finished, he didn't know anything more about bamboo than when he started. Wang believed that he should have done something besides merely stare in order to find out about bamboo (taken it apart, for example, or made something out of it), though no doubt when he was finished he had a very clear "mental representation" of the bamboo upon which he gazed.

And he himself came to the knowledge that he possessed - of military and administrative as well as or philosophical matters - by acting. He was a spectacularly successful military leader and administrator (as well as, for a time, a wanted criminal and subversive), and says that he came to realize the truth of Confucianism by trying to organize counties and armies. It is little wonder, then, that he came to believe that knowledge and action were, at least in their genuine moments, identical.

In the West, knowledge and action come apart most famously in Plato. One might naturally enough view knowing as a techne or skill, or rather, one might naturally enough view skills or crafts as knowings. Yet skills are trainings by activity that are expressed in activity; to be a good potter is simply to know how to throw a good pot, and one comes to know how to throw a good pot precisely by throwing pots. Then one knows clay, the stuff, and one knows what can be done with clay, and hence comes to be able to produce utterances about the character, capacities, and recalcitrances of clay. There are not two things here: working clay and reflecting on that working. Knowledge guides the working, and simultaneously, emerges out of the working; building the pot and building the knowledge are the very same thing.

Yet Plato conceived knowledge apart from techne as that which abstracted from the particular into the general. Indeed, so intense is this abstraction that the particular situation - the material, its working, also one's body as what works - do not appear at all in the order of knowledge. For example, Socrates argues in the Symposium that one learns about beauty out of an encounter with beautiful things, but that from this experience one derives an understanding of Beauty which transcends those things and shows them to be imperfectly beautiful. The reflection expunges the reality, so much so that knowledge requires the death of the body, just as it requires seeing the unreality (and ugliness) of beautiful things. This knowledge is conceived as acquaintance with the form expressed in the language as definition. The bizarre result is the claim that the philosopher in the privacy of his academy could know more about clay than the potter.

Even in cases where we have learned enough to be suspicious of or to despise dualisms of this kind, the picture of knowledge as cognition residing in the order of language maintains a sway over epistemology. Though the fragmentations involved differ in their details, they are fragmentations nevertheless: privilegings of mind as the place of language and hence of knowledge. One might be a Cartesian, or an idealist, or a deconstructionist, or for that matter a materialist, and reinscribe the same isolation of a zone of inscription. Meanwhile, whatever one knows one knows in acting in the world, being a body in the world. The cognizer who was merely a page of propositions or narratives, if such a thing were possible, would be, precisely, one who does not know, whose "knowledge" is "merely academic," who produces the right sounds (gives, perhaps, a definition, or an argument), but for all that "has no idea what he's talking about."

Wang writes:

People today distinguish between knowledge and action and pursue them separately, believing that one must know before one can act. They will discuss and learn the business of knowledge first, they say, and wait till they truly know before they put their knowledge into practice. Consequently, to the last day of their life, they will never act and they will never know. This . . . is not a minor disease. (Wang, p. 11)

This "disease" arises whether texts are conceived to be derived from the world or to be brought to the world in order to make it comprehensible. (The latter is perhaps a more virulent sickness.) Mere cognition, conceived as the manipulation of texts, never amounts to knowledge, even if in some abstractive sense "what one says," or writes, or believes, is true. (As Wang says, "The mind of an expert is singularly distressed." (43)). Notice that even in common parlance, one cannot know a proposition. One can, however, know a proposition to be true. This suggests, and I will pursue the suggestion, that the "object of knowledge" is not the textual or propositional item or at all, but whatever it is that makes the textual item true, i.e. (in some cases, at any rate) a real-world situation. One might say truly that filial piety is treating one's parents with the respect that is due them. Yet one might, in saying this, be a parrot or a tape recorder. The tape recorder "says something true," but it does not know what it is saying. A psychopath may say all sorts of true things about conscience; the right sentences bounce around in his cognition and emerge from his mouth. Yet the psychopath not only does not know the human conscience, he does not know much about the human conscience. The Republic shows, if nothing else, that Plato was utterly ignorant of statecraft. Yet there are true sentences embedded here and there in the moral horror of ruling by lies and the nauseating fantasies about human malleability [see Bradford]. Wang Yang-ming learned statecraft by trying to administer a state.

Wang argues explicitly that producing "true sentences" (or, for that matter, good narratives), in whatever pattern, is not sufficient for knowledge.

I have said that knowledge is the direction for action and action the effort of knowledge, and that knowledge is the beginning of action and action the completion of knowledge. . . . The reason why the ancients talked about knowledge and action separately is that there are people in the world who are confused and act on impulse without any sense of deliberation or self-examination, and who thus behave blindly and erroneously. Therefore it is necessary to talk about knowledge to them before their action becomes correct. There are also those who are intellectually vague and undisciplined and think in a vacuum. They are not at all willing to make the effort of concrete practice. They only pursue shadows and echoes, as it were. It is therefore necessary to talk about action to them before their knowledge becomes true. (11)

This passage is aimed at two classes of people who essentially have the same problem: fools and philosophers. The one forecloses on action idiotically by a failure of presence within action, a breakdown of awareness. If this goes far enough, action itself will be made impossible, because idiocy is dangerous. The other forecloses on knowledge philosophically by inventing reflection detached from activity. Until it becomes action and emerges out of action, knowledge is not "true," i.e. real.

Hence, Wang rejects the distinction between concrete or specific knowledge - knowledge of the sort produced in the crafts, for instance - and general knowledge, knowledge of principles.

What the eye can see, what the ear can hear, what the mouth can say, and what the mind can think of are all matters of learning on the lower level, whereas what the ear cannot hear, what the mouth cannot say, and what the mind cannot think of are matters of penetration on the higher level. For example, providing a tree with care and water is learning on the lower level, whereas the activity of the vegetative life day and night and the tree's smooth and luxuriant growth are penetration on the higher level. How can human efforts have any part of it? Therefore whatever human effort can do and whatever can be talked about represent learning on the lower level. But penetration on the higher level is implicit in learning on the lower level. All that the Sage [Confucius] said, although absolutely refined and subtle, is a matter of lower learning. A student should direct his efforts to this, and penetration on the higher level will naturally follow. There is no need to seek a separate and distinct way of higher penetration. (28-9)

Knowledge on the higher level - knowledge of the general principles of growth in trees, for example - is not derived from reflection on materials gathered from the activity of the care and feeding of trees. Rather, the ability to care for trees, an ability learned from and informing the activity of caring for trees, constitutes knowledge of the principles of growth. To know what will help a tree grow is to know something about how trees grow.

Cognitivism in its primordial expression in Plato separates a person into a temporal actor and an atemporal faculty of reflection. The forms wielded in reflection stand outside the order of time; they are eternal. And in subsequent developments of cognitivism, the usefulness and high standing of concepts reflects their suspension of the temporal. Concepts such as "dog" are general in that they gather up a scattered body of particulars into a generality that enables comprehension, enables one to survey spatially scattered particulars in a single act of intellection. But they are general also in that the survey is made across time; while particular dogs are born and die, or move here and there, the concept 'dog' lingers on. It is not surprising, given his account of knowledge, including general knowledge of principles, that Wang temporalizes concepts.

For Wang identifies not only knowledge and action, but events and principles. "Events are really principles and principles are really events" (23). This notion had a variety of applications for Wang. First of all, it meant that to study history or to immerse oneself in ongoing events was to find out the deepest principles of the universe. Since every human event shows the principles of things, we can come to know the universe if only we can act intelligently. (Intelligence for Wang is a way of acting, not a faculty.) Second, Wang constructs a dynamic metaphysics, a view according to which even principles and concepts are historically located, are unfolded in time. In fact, li (or the rites, central to Confucianism) are a perfect example of Wang's view. The rites are historically located; they are developed at a certain point in history, and may have to be changed or adapted at another point. Yet they still reflect in human life the principles of things. Ceremony marks changes in the seasons, births, marriages, deaths, ascensions to throne, by concerted collective action. To the extent that language is a body of li (a doctrine suggested by the Confucian notion of the rectification of names), language too is something that unfolds historically. That is to be expected, since the principles that can be said in language are not static. Even, then, if knowledge is conceived linguistically, it requires action, for language unfolds as an event, and we must unfold with it if we are to know with it.

In his epistemology, Wang emphasizes simultaneity. If, in the activity of caring for trees, the practical knowledge of forestry and the knowledge of the principles of tree growth occur simultaneously, then we ought at least to be suspicious of the attempt to extricate them from one another, to turn them into three things (the activity, the practical knowledge, and the theoretical knowledge), each of a radically different kind. The claim that these are three different things reflects the imposition of an a priori taxonomy; the only reason we believe these events to be different, though they happen at the same time and in the same location, is because we bring with us an epistemology that requires their difference. We do not discover them to be different; rather, we require them to be different in order to bring them into accord with a fragmented picture of the knower and a fragmented picture of the known object.

III.

Wang made yet another momentous identification, saying that knowledge was essentially connected to affect: to desire, love, need, hate.

Seeing beautiful colors appertains to knowledge, while loving beautiful colors appertains to action. However, as soon as one sees that beautiful color, one has already loved it. It is not as though he sees it first and then makes up his mind to love it. . . . Suppose we say that so-and-so knows filial piety and so-and-so knows brotherly respect. They must have actually practiced filial piety and brotherly respect before they can be said to know them. It will not do to say they know filial piety and brotherly respect simply because they show them in words. Or take one's knowledge of pain. Only after one has experienced pain can one know pain. (10)

Or as Wang also says, to know the bitterness of a melon, one must taste the melon (82). This much should at least be admitted: one knows brotherly respect only in an impoverished respect if one restricts this knowing to believing true propositions about brotherly respect. One can examine many propositions about love, for instance, yet we say that one does not know love until one has loved. Having loved will enable one to inscribe true texts about love, yet one could read such texts without knowing what it is to love.

Truth does not inhere in sentences or propositions as some property intrinsic to them, or some relation of them to the world, or to other propositions. Truth, if it is something that sentences or propositions can be said in any sense to have, is something they have on occasions of utterance [see Austin, pp. 119-20]. We sometimes say "It is true that p," but sometimes we say "It is true to say that p" [Austin, pp. 116-17]. The latter gives a more literal rendering of the truth ascription; truth is ascribed not to p, but to the saying. Truth is something people use utterances to say. This is obvious, for example, with regard to sentences that contain indexical expressions, such as "He went to the store." Sentences can only be differentiated from one another syntactically, and the very same syntactical item functions now to say the truth, now to say something false. And the proposition as an atemporal, quasi-linguistic bearer of truth value ("what we assert," say, when we "express the same thing" in different languages) has proven to be a chimera; as one tries to tie off all the loose indexical and occasional elements of the utterance or inscription, and then of the sentence into the self-contained proposition, the occasion of utterance keeps slipping out again.

Thus, truth is something sentences or propositions have, if they have it at all, only as uttered on occasions, that is, only in a full-fledged context. It matters who utters the sentence, when, and how. The armchair lover who writes a book about love may write exactly what the lover who loves writes about love. Yet what the one writes is empty, and what the other writes is full. What the one writes is a series of cliches, or speculations; what the other writes is the truth of his love. His truth has emerged in a long series of experiences, that is, in perceptions of the beloved and in the extinction of perceptions of the beloved, in movements toward the beloved and away from the beloved, in the beloved's return of love or failure to return love. Those experiences are the lover's knowledge, a knowledge which he renders into the text. What is true is the love; the text is true if, in its inscription, its scribe keeps faith with the love that gave it birth.

We could summarize Wang's doctrine along these lines, in relation to cognitivism: There are not separable moments of going out and having experiences, responding to these experiences affectively, and then withdrawing from the immediacy of affect and reflecting on the materials. To see a beautiful color and to love it are a single act. And to love it and to know that it is beautiful are the same act. One sees a beautiful thing, delights in it, wants it, moves toward it, and comes to know it - all in an event the so-called physical, affective, and cognitive aspects of which are inextricable from one another. To know that a color is beautiful, then, is not primarily to mutter to oneself the sentence "it is beautiful," and then to authorize that as a truth. This knowledge is the act of appreciation, which is in turn the act of seeing, which is in turn the act of coming into bodily proximity with the object. When one comes to formulate the utterance "it is beautiful," one does so because one already knows that it is beautiful; one knew this in the act of love itself.

So it looks as though we might put it this way, for a start: The manipulation of textual materials into knowledges is a reconstruction or reflection of knowledge already possessed in action and affect. The sentences we know to be true would on this view be conceived as reformulations into the medium of language of the knowledge we already possess. It then looks as though we have "immediate" knowledge which we subsequently mediate into the medium of words. But experience is a complex transaction involving a whole person in an environmental context, and it certainly includes textual materials in a wide variety of ways. The knowledge that the color is beautiful simply is the experience of it as beautiful, with all the desire and so forth that entails. Making the text or proposition the primary object of knowledge traps us in the flickering light of a cognition conceived of as reflective or articulatory. What is known is the world, not a proposition that reflects the world, and not the narrative that articulates the world or makes it comprehensible. On the contrary: the world is what makes the text comprehensible; otherwise it is a mere syntax.

But 'beauty' is a word, a word with a history. Around it cluster uses, practices, even theories. 'Beauty' is a complex set of social conventions. Yet it is nevertheless true that one says 'beauty' and knows beauty in a single affective act. One is already located within the history of the word in the experience. The word and its history and the beauty of the world come together; one is not a 'reflection' of the other; neither derives from the other. I am located in the social as I experience a beautiful thing; I am located in beauty when I speak the word. One is already located within a language as part of the world, a history of utterances, as one is also located within a context of objects that are not linguistic, and also in their unfolding.

The world, therefore, is what is known. And one might even say this: The world is what is true. Indeed, that in some sense follows from the fact that the world is what is known. Knowing that a proposition was true would then be a sort of shorthand for knowing something to be real. Think of a locution such as "the sea is truly vast," which one might re-write as "truly, the sea is vast," or "it is true that the sea is vast." These formulations are roughly equivalent, yet the last one seems to attribute the mysterious status of truth to a quasi-textual item, the proposition, while the others attribute reality to the vast sea. We can, that is, represent ourselves as traversing the order of language in the "propositional attitude" of believing or in the textual activity of interpretation, or we can represent ourselves as traversing the vast sea in the act of coming to believe of it that it is vast. We do not fail to be located in the order and disorder of language when we traverse the sea and know that it is vast. But we also do not fail to traverse the sea, the vastness of which greatly exceeds our language.

IV.

We are dealing, then, with a world that contains both utterances and other things, either of which may be "true." Pieces of the world are "true" in that they are real. True beauty is real beauty, true love is real love, true stupidity is real stupidity [cf. Heidegger, p. 119]. Of course, it would then follow that all utterances are true, in that they are real. And that is right in this sense: all actual utterances are truly utterances. But in the sense in which we distinguish true from false utterances, we indeed locate the utterance in a web of relations. As Austin points out, we may look and see that some utterance is true; and here we look to the world [Austin, 133]. If truth were correspondence, or coherence, or a matter of linguistic conventions, it would be impossible to look away from the utterance into the world to see whether a proposition were true. One would be engaged in an assessment of isomorphism between sentence and situation, or would be scanning a dictionary, or writing a novel, or something. But what we look to is not a situation external to ourselves and the utterer, but to a situation in which the utterer is embedded.

The truth of utterances may be described as their keeping faith with the real, or as the keeping-faith of the utterer (obviously, an affective state). This keeping faith is called by Heidegger "letting being be" [Heidegger, sections 4 and 5]. True love is faithful. The lover who writes the truth of love is keeping faith with the experience of love, though in another case the very same sentences could be used in an expression that breaks faith with love, and is, hence, false. "My love is like a red, red rose" was true when Shakespeare inscribed it; it can hardly be inscribed truly now; it has come, in its history, to be trite, to stand in only for an inability to love, for an emptiness in which no love can inhere. Thus, speaking the truth is an affective act; it arises in a resolution of faith. This faith, too, is something that we call by the name of the real. We say, for example, that a person is present in utterances that she "really means" and feels deeply. And we say of a person who habitually speaks thus that she is real. We mean by this, first, that she is not shamming, and we mean that she knows whereof she speaks; she has won her way to this speaking through hard experience. What issues from her lips or her pen takes up a place in the world. [For a fuller discussion of these issues see Sartwell.]

This brings us to the last of Wang Yang-ming's identifications, one that was already traditional in neo-Confucianism by the time of the Ming dynasty: "The human mind and the principle of nature are undifferentiated" (26). Wang has been termed an "idealist" because of such declarations, but the term is at best misleading. Such passages are better read, I suggest, as an expression of the belief that the order of nature and the order of knowledge cannot be pulled apart, that knowledge does not arise in representation or reflection. This is a natural reading because Wang's identification of knowledge and action follows indirectly from it. And it could be extended into a treatment of language of the sort I have been pressing. Utterances and inscriptions take up a place in the real, and are true or false according to the ways they take up that place: from whence, how, and into what they are made.

For Wang, that means that human action is the action of the universe, is the universe itself acting in persons.

When [the] creative principle of the nature of man and things emanates through the eye, the eye can see; through the ear, the ear can hear; through the mouth, the mouth can speak; and through the four limbs, they can move. All this is the growth and development of the Principle of Nature. (80)

Thus, a knowledge of human affairs, such as how to administer a district or conduct a battle, is knowledge of the universe in germ, just as the care and feeding of trees is knowledge of the principles of their growth.

Knowing Heaven is the same as knowing the affairs of a district or a county. . . . It is a matter within one's own function, and it means that one in his moral character has already become one with Heaven. (Wang, p. 13)

Coming to know, for Wang, is acting or, to phrase it slightly differently, emerging into some zone of the real and working there. This winds up as the key to formulating an ethics. To be real - or to keep faith with the world, to be true - is to be sincere, and if one can return to sincerity of mind, one can realize one's own reality and the reality of things in action. "Realize the substance of the mind through personal experience at all times. . . . Sincerity is the original substance of the mind. To try to restore this original substance is the work of thinking how to be sincere" (77, 8). Then one acts in and with nature, in and with reality, and then one knows. The deepest immorality is a violation of sincerity, a separation of oneself and one's words in imagination from the world. A total immersion in the world (which is the fate of all of us in any case), is the source of goodness; to be a good son is sincerely to be a son, to immerse oneself in one's relation to one's parents, and not to expunge this relation in an imaginary or universalizing ethical reflection.

To manifest the clear character is none other than to make the will sincere, and the task of making the will sincere is none other than the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge. If one regards the sincerity of the will as the basis and from there proceeds to the task of the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge, only then can the task have a solution. Even the task of doing good and removing evil are nothing but the work of the sincerity of the will. (86)

What cognitivism and textualism do, finally, is to betray one's own reality by fragmenting the self and setting it apart in or from the order of nature. Reflection in this sense is insincerity, a delusory withdrawal from action and hence from knowledge. If reflection were possible, all its products would be false, even if they were embodied in "true propositions." And if our experience were top-to-bottom articulated in the order and disorder of language, we could never come to live in the truth, which consists in responding to world's demands even as we make demands upon it. To become sincere is to become real, that is, to acknowledge one's action in nature and nature's action in one, not as a general truth, but specifically in the crafts of living, that is, in knowledge. To become sincere is to come to be true to the world, to keep faith with the world in action.

Austin, J.L., "Truth," in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 116-133.

Bradford, Judith, "Arguments on the Body: Truth and Discipline in Plato's Republic" (unpublished manuscript).

Dewey, John, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930).

Heidegger, Martin, "On the Essence of Truth," trans. John Sallis in Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 117-141.

Sartwell, Crispin, Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming), chapter 2.

Wang Yang-ming, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, n.d.).