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Philosophical bases

哲学基础 〔哲學基礎〕zhé xué jī chǔ

The philosophical bases of Chinese medicine are the ideas prevalent among natural philosophers of the formative period that influenced its development, notably:

Theories, Doctrines, or Paradigms

Are qì, yīn-yáng, and the five phases theories, doctrines, or paradigms? Theory in the modern sense, suggests that they are subject to falsification or verification by scientific methods. They are based on observation, intuition, and analogy, rather than empirical evidence, logical deduction, or mathematical proof. Doctrine suggests that they are binding principles that should always be adhered to, when in qì, yīn-yáng, and the five phases are assumptions rather than principles. Paradigm seems to be the best word because, according to Merriam-Webster a paradigm is a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated. A second definition of paradigm as an outstandingly clear or typical example or archetype also applies, since qì, yīn-yáng, and the five phases are instances of an underlying framework of analogy and correspondence.

Note Chinese medical textbooks speak of 学说 xuē shuō, which means both theory and doctrine.

Ideas from outside Chinese medicine have their mark on the development of Chinese medicine over the centuries, notably the religious and philosophical ideas of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, as well as the recent sociopolitical ideas of Communism and the scientific framework of modern biomedicine. However, qì, yīn-yáng, the five phases―and not least the analogical thinking that characterizes the latter two―have had the widest and deepest impact on Chinese medical theories. These ideas are explained at great length in Chapter 3 of Chinese Medicine: The Ideas that Shaped It (Wiseman and Wilms, Paradigm Publications, 2021). A key feature of these concepts is analogy.

Cognitive Features: Analysis and Analogy

Human beings are naturally endowed with a toolkit to understand ourselves and the world around us. When we want to understand how things work, we can break them down to understand how the various parts contribute to the functions of the whole. We can also see what similarities they have with more familiar things. Any human instinctively knows that birds, butterflies, and aircraft fly because they have wings and that when the wings are removed, they cannot fly. In this, we use analytical thinking to distinguish the wings from other parts of the thing. At the same time, we use our conclusions about one thing or class of things, say birds, to help us understand other classes of things, such as butterflies and aircraft. Hence, there are two fundamental approaches operant in our cognition: the analytical or reductionist approach and the analogical or correlative approach.

Modern scientific knowledge is primarily based on the analytical approach. By breaking things down into individual components, the complex world of physics and biology has been understood in great detail. However, analogical thinking is applied in classification systems. It is also often used in developing hypotheses (e.g., the brain functions like a computer).

Chinese medicine also applies analytical thinking. Many of its basic theories are firmly grounded in it, such as the digestive function of the stomach, the respiratory function of the lung, and the urinary function of the kidney. The analytical function is also operant in the development of empirical knowledge of the therapeutic effects of specific medicinals or acupoints. Nevertheless, Chinese medicine differs in its approach in that it rests much more heavily on the analogical approach of understanding things by comparison with others. Phenomena happening within the body are understood in terms of things outside the body. For example, many functions of the internal organs, such as the spleen’s function of producing qì and blood, the lung’s function of governing the waterways, and the kidney’s function of storing essence are all discoveries that were prompted by analogies to nature. The highest concentration of analogy is found in theories derived from qì, yīn-yáng, and the five phases. For more about analogical thinking, see the following:

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