In this paper, we will report results of two sets of cross-linguistic studies about truth judgments and correctness judgments by speakers of English and Japanese, which will show a significant influence of a moral-political factor in an utterance on Japanese truth/correctness judgments. Following up Mizumoto (2022), which demonstrated such an effect on Japanese truth judgments and correctness judgments about utterances containing a contrastive conjunction (such as “but”), Study 1 shows the same effect on Japanese correctness judgments about utterances containing a (...) pejorative. Study 2 then shows that a moral-political factor in utterances can affect Japanese truth/correctness judgments about them even if they are simple utterances containing neither a contrastive conjunction nor a pejorative. In conclusion, we will briefly discuss whether this effect is linguistic or psychological, and present three hypotheses: the semantic hypothesis, pragmatic hypothesis, and error theory hypothesis, to account for the data, which we leave open for future studies. (shrink)

Although a sizable number of works on analytic philosophy are published in non-Western languages, the literature continues to be written mainly in Western languages, especially English and German. This article makes a case for discussing analytic philosophy in Chinese and argues that it entails a dilemma: it can fulfill either the audience-service or knowledge-service functions but not both at the same time. This is problematic because a standard original or critical philosophical article should fulfill both functions. Then, to challenge the (...) validity of this dilemma, I pose the hypothetical scenario of Jake, who writes a marvelous, purely original publication on analytic philosophy in Chinese. This article posits that the dilemma will not be undermined by such a case and suggests an alternative way to resolve it. (shrink)

To have a coherent picture of Wang Chong’s Lunheng is difficult. Some of Lunheng’s chapters obviously show Wang’s hostility to a large part of the folklore (including the social institutions based...