Did the Chinese Have a Change of Heart?

Abstract

In their ''The Prevalence of Mind-Body Dualism in Early China,'' Slingerland and Chudek use a statistical analysis of the early Chinese corpus to argue for Weak Folk Dualism (WFD). We raise three methodological objections to their analysis. First, the change over time that they find is largely driven by genre. Second, the operationalization of WFD is potentially misleading. And, third, dating the texts they use is extremely controversial. We conclude with some positive remarks.

The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China

“…In addition to this more traditional evidence against the strong mind-body holist position, several years ago the results of a methodologically novel, team-based coding project (Slingerland and Chudek 2011) A critique of this study by (Klein and Klein 2011) included charges that the study was biased by drawing a large proportion of its pre-Warring States (before 5 th century BCE) sample from a single text, the Book of Odes, a collection of poetry one would expect to contain an unusually high number of emotion words. Another concern voiced about the study is that a large proportion of the texts analyzed could be classed as philosophical works, which might exaggerate how much xin is portrayed as possessing cognitive functions.…”