Logic in ancient China

Abstract

Ancient Chinese Logic may be likened to a conceptual “extract” from the Chinese strategy of survival and dominance. From the perspective of Chinese thinkers, who considered foresight the most important cognitive ability, the value of an inference is primarily determined by its efficiency; this is why their attention was focused mainly on the ability of deductive reasoning to yield final result. That is why the formal aspect of inference is understood as 'strategic formality': graphic visualization of the mechanism behind the winning or losing strategy served as a formal justification for the predictability of the outcome of a chosen strategy. The article makes explicit the logical nature of Chinese stratagem thinking.