THREE META-QUESTIONS IN EPISTEMOLOGY: RETHINKING SOME METAPHORS IN ZHUANGZI*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The metaphors in the Zhuangzi have a strong appeal to scholars both in China and the West.In this article, I do not intend to discuss the general features of Zhuangzi's metaphors 1 nor the all metaphors in the Zhuangzi.Instead, I shall specifically argue that Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself?2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others?3) What can I know about the world?I shall demonstrate, by reanalyzing some of Zhuangzi's metaphors, that the discovery of these three metaquestions is Zhuangzi's valuable contribution to epistemology.I. Do I Know I Myself: Self-Identification of an Epistemic Subject Do I know I myself?This is an initial question that we should clarify before dealing with any other epistemological issue.Zhuangzi puts this question in his metaphor of the butterfly: Once Chuang Chou [Zhuang Zhou] dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased.He didn't know he was Chuang Chou.Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou.But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.Between Chung Chou and a butterfly, there must be some distinction!This is called the Transformation of Things. 2What is the meaning of this story as a metaphor?Between the lines many scholars read that this story tells us about the relationships between soul and body, existence and non-existence, being and nonbeing, life and death, certainty and uncertainty, continuity and dis-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".