Chinese Studies in the Age of Consilience: New Approaches drawn from the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences

The Carolina Asia Center hosts a discussion with Edward Slingerland on how new approaches to Chinese religious thought has implications for our understanding of China today

Edward Slingerland, Professor of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, and Associate Member, of the Depts. of Philosophy and Psychology, University of British Columbia

“In this talk I will draw upon the case example of early Chinese religious thought to demonstrate how a “consilient” approach to Chinese studies can help us make progress on problems that have long concerned us. New content knowledge and new methodologies drawn from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences can help us hone in on plausible interpretative strategies and give us new tools to interrogate our texts. For instance, findings about the nature of human cognition can serve as hermeneutical limit setters when it comes to interpreting texts from ancient or alien cultures, imposing some brakes upon the humanistic tendency to impute radical strangeness to the cultural “Other.” Similarly, techniques of large-scale textual corpus sampling and coding, or the construction of large, searchable databases, can supplement the qualitative intuitions of experts in a given field with quantitative data; with the advent of a new age of “digital humanities,” the potential power of such analyses is already enormous and continually growing. At the same time, the sciences are badly in need of the sort of linguistic, historical and cultural expertise that is the specialty of area studies scholars. A new “second wave” of consilience recognizes the science-humanities cooperation is a two-way street, and points the way toward a future of genuinely productive and collaborative interdisciplinary research.”