§106. The Hundred Schools
Traditional China engaged in fruitful experimentation on many fronts without self-conscious empiricism or experimental philosophy. Practitioners did not conceptualize experiments as a topic-neutral art that could be directed at problems in traditionally noncommunicating domains.
In sum, theirs were experiments (including observations) without empiricism, that is, experiments without a philosophical concept of an experiment admitting of topic-neutral use on problems of knowledge.That is what early experimentalists like Gilbert and Harvey thought was no less important than their material results, namely, the new method by which they derived them (§41). Gilbert describes experiments as something “by which notably every philosophy flourisheth.” Harvey knew his experiments were something new in natural philosophy. “By revealing the method I use in searching into things, I may set before studious men a new and if I mistake not a surer path to the attainment of knowledge.” Their investigations of very different objects (blood, iron) express a new idea about method, a topic-neutral art of inquiry that might be applied to advantage in other fields. This art of experiments is an art of arts, an art by which to reform or, as Dewey says, reconstruct any art, to make it more artful, more consistently experimental, more philosophically empirical.62
Despite far-ranging experiments, thinking about experimentation remained undeveloped in China. No philosophy of experiment emerges from their experimental practice, and none of the philosophical lineages introduce experimental experience into their ideas on nature, knowledge, or virtue. That does not mean they were not “empirical,” or offer no variation on empiricism’s themes, but rather that we should not expect their empiricism to share a European assumption about the value of knowledge. I shall consider two currents of Daoist thought on sense experience, and the empiricism of some Confucian and neo-Confucian texts.