认知心理学视野中的儒家正名论——以两汉政治为研究切片

The Confucian Notion of Names from the Lens of Cognitive Psychology——The Political Philosophy in Western & Eastern Han Dynasties Revisited

儒家正名论的认知心理学本质,乃是通过某种被先验接受的概念规范来对外部信息进行快速分类,由此提高认知主体的信息处理效率。因此,一个诉诸“正名”机制的地方伦理共同体就能以更高的效率促成内部的团结。然而,在孔子提出正名理论时他所处的春秋小共同体社会结构渐渐演化为秦汉式的超级帝国后,统治者所要面对的社会关系的复杂度便有了全面的提升,这就使得本只能处理简单人际关系的正名理论不敷使用了。在这里,文明的分歧也便出现了:希腊—罗马社会开始演化出一套基于“慢思维”的新社会建制来弥补“快思维”的疏漏;而与之相较,汉儒们则通过系统整理儒家的仪轨而将在“快思维”中模糊呈现的先天社会规范予以明述化,由此强行达成“全社会行动整齐划一”的效果。然而,这种“整齐划一”效果的达成,必然是依赖于创制者所掌握的社会资源的,而这一点也就使得资源掌控者有更多的机会让新创制的名分成为牟取私利的工具。这最终使得旨在强化政治稳定的名分论很难不经由这种私利的掺杂而走向自己的反面:谣言。

From the lens of cognitive psychology,the Confucian theory on the rectification of names could be viewed as appeals to entrenchedethical/political paradigms substantially facilitating the process of producing moral judgments.In this sense,a local community can easily achieve its internal integrity by relying on this name-rectifying mechanism.However,as soon as the historical background of the Spring and Autumn Period,when Confucius firstly put forward the very theory of the rectification of names,was updated as that of Han Dynasty,the imperial structure of which left relatively small space for the autonomy of local communities,the original Confucian name-rectifying narrative turned out to be not so adaptive to new social environments with unexpected social complexity in an empirescale.Though the discovery of same problem forced the Greek-Roman culture to embrace new social constitutions(like democracy and "rule by law") encouraging "slow thinking"(in Kahneman's sense),which leaves time to the falsifying procedures of certain claims,the ideological evolution of the Han Dynasty did take another route eventually,namely,to articulate previously assumed social norms as a systematical hierarchy to normalize everyone's behaviors in the empire.However,the compulsoriness of these norms itself is based on the control of resources,and hence,resourcecontrollers' own interests will inevitably undermine the fairness of the whole name-rectifying narrative,and thereby convert it into a rumor-inducing process.