A Halfhearted Defense of the Perceptual Model of Wang Yangming’s “Genuine Knowing”

Wang Yangming (1472–1529) is one of the most provocative philosophers in the long Confucian tradition. He has also been the subject of renewed interest in recent years, particularly thanks to a series of incisive papers by Harvey Lederman. Lederman has articulated various approaches to interpreting Wang Yangming’s view of “genuine knowledge” and has argued for his own approach, which he calls the “Introspective Model.” Lederman maintains that most recent scholarship supports an alternative, the “Perceptual Model.” This paper begins by reviewing some of Lederman’s key arguments against the Perceptual Model and for the Introspective Model, and then points to suggestive gaps in Lederman’s argumentation whereby the significance of affect for understanding Wang’s view is downplayed. Later sections of the paper review a range of evidence—in particular, Wang’s challenging remarks about the “inherent reality” of our everyday heartmental states, which have been neglected by most interpreters—all of which points toward a central role for affect, not cognitive or doxastic states, in Wang’s conception of genuine knowing. The paper’s argument is not so much a defense of a perceptual model as an articulation of an alternative “affective model” which in turn points to a quite different understanding of epistemology than many interpreters have assumed.