Thoughts on Logan's The Alphabet Effect
by Dominic Yu
2003 January 3
In Chapter 3 ("A Comparison of Eastern and Western Writing Systems and Their Impact on
Cultural Patterns") of Robert K. Logan's The Alphabet Effect, Logan claims that "the absence
of Western-style abstractions and classification schemes in Chinese culture" (47), including
such things as systematic logical reasoning, codified legal systems, and monotheism, is due to
the fact that Western writing is alphabetic, whereas Chinese writing is not. In this essay, I will
show that most of Logan's arguments are flawed(not perfect,containin’ mistakes), and that
Logan's main points, although interesting, ultimately tell us little more than the fact that
Chinese characters are complex.
Logan's basic premise, that Chinese characters are inherently less abstract than alphabetic
characters, is incorrect. He states that "the alphabet is used phonetically to visually represent
the sound of a word," whereas "Chinese characters are used pictographically to represent the
idea of a word and hence are less abstract than alphabetic writing" (47, emphasis mine).
However, this is an inaccurate description of Chinese writing. While there do exist characters
which are historically derived from pictograms, all Chinese characters represent sounds, just
as the symbols from all other writing systems in the world represent sounds. Moreover, the
forms of Chinese characters have been revised and simplified so many times in the course of
their development that the vast majority of them are no longer transparently recognizable (one
would need the help of historical texts). Thus, the description of Chinese writing as
"pictographic" applied to the standard characters that have been used for the last two thousand
years or so is not appropriate. Take, for example, the character 他, representing the third
person singular pronoun "tā". The left hand component, the "person" radical, indicates that
this character vaguely has something to do with a person or people. I say "vaguely" because
this is a very common radical is also used in characters such as 份, 假, and 做, meaning,
"portion," "fake," and "to do," respectively. The right side is a phonetic component indicating
that (at some earlier stage of Chinese), this character rhymed with 也, now pronounced "yě."
Nothing in this character indicates the idea of "third person singular pronoun." From this
example, we can see that Chinese characters mainly represent sounds, and only represent
ideas in a rather insignificant way. Thus, Logan's claim that Chinese characters represent the
"idea of a word" is baseless.
In his first concrete example, Logan talks about the Chinese legal system, saying that Chinese
law was not codified. While this may be a true statement, Logan provides no evidence that
this has anything to do with the writing system. He only states that "the Chinese developed
two concepts of law: 'fa' and li'" (50), and then proceeds to explain these two concepts. What
he overlooks, though, is that this has nothing to do with the writing system; the number and/or
types of concepts associated with any concept, including law, is independent of the writing
system. The concepts develop, and people subsequently find ways of writing them down on
paper. Indeed, concepts are borrowed from culture to culture throughout history; with the
influence of Buddhism from India, for example, Chinese writing adapted by making up new
characters or adapting old ones for new uses. Another example: many of the
philosophers/thinkers of the Enlightenment in seventeenth century Europe, such as Leibniz
and Voltaire, were inspired by Chinese philosophy. But I digress.
Next, Logan claims that "the Chinese ideographic script" was one of the "inhibitory factors to
the growth of modern science" (54), for two reasons: first, the Chinese script has subliminal
or hidden effects which are adverse to abstract scientific thinking; second, the alphabet, being
a natural tool for classification, served as a paradigm for scientific classification (55). Logan
gives absolutely no evidence to support the first claim. He merely lists, in his Table III (56),
twelve characters, the scientific term in English that each character is supposed to represent,
and a description of what the original symbol represented. For example, the character 始,
meaning "to begin," is described as "a drawing of a woman and a fetus." Logan states:
an examination of the table reveals that even the most abstract scientific term must be
rendered in a concrete form when it is written. This, no doubt, has had a subliminal effect on
Chinese scientific thinking. (55)
As we have argued above, the forms of the Chinese characters in use for the last two thousand
years can hardly be described as "concrete." In fact, I would guess that most readers of
Chinese would not even think of the character for "begin" as being a drawing of a woman and
a fetus (if indeed that is what it is; it seems like a simple phonetic to me, as it rhymes with
things like 怡, 治, and 笞), and even if they had read elsewhere that that was what the
character originally represented, their minds have better things to do than to dwell upon that
fact every time they come across the character in their readings. Thus, in the spirit of the
scientific method, I would suggest that the subliminal effect that Chinese characters have on
scientific thinking is a topic to be investigated, rather than the foregone conclusion that Logan
thinks it is.
Logan's second reason, that alphabetic writing served as a paradigm for scientific
classification and therefore abstract scientific thought, also stands on shaky ground. First of
all, Chinese characters can certainly be classified, in any number of ways: by radical, stroke
order, stroke count, or even phonetically. In fact, the sheer number of them necessitates some
sort of classification scheme. But even granted that the Chinese script is complex (e.g., it has
been said that Chinese phone books are hard to use, and looking in a dictionary for a character
which one does not know the pronunciation of can certainly bring up its own difficulties), we
must first discuss a more fundamental issue, and that is the nature of modern science. Logan
seems to think that classification is key to modern science. In fact, classification is a
fundamental cognitive process, and humans have been engaging in it for millenia. What is
unique about modern science, it seems to me, is not classification, but the entire process
which we call the scientific method: observation, analysis, construction of a hypothesis, and
testing of said hypothesis, which goes back to observation and analysis. Modern science is
about building unified theories and models that help up explain and predict the world; it is not
about classifying things into a set number of categories.
Logan's most ridiculous claim is that the development of monotheism was encouraged by
alphabetic writing. (Indeed, there is no reason to think that polytheism vs. monotheism even
falls into the concrete/abstract distinction that Logan makes, but this is beyond the scope of
this essay.) Of the major religions practiced today, all three monotheistic ones—Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam--can be said to be derived from the same source, the religion of the
Israelites, which began, let's say, with Moses around 1300 BCE. This was several centuries
before the Greek alphabet (the first true alphabet) was developed, around 1000 BCE. Note
also that Greek religion was by no means monotheistic, even though their writing system was
alphabetic. The other noteworthy monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, came about around
600 BCE in modern-day Afghanistan/Iran, where at that time they were still using cuneiform.
We have seen above that Logan's arguments about the impact of Chinese logographic writing
on law, science, and religion are completely without basis. Moreover, Chinese characters,
though complex, are not more concrete than alphabetic writing in any essential way, and
certainly not pictographic, as he describes. The history of cultures and ideas is complex, with
many different concepts and entities interacting. In view of this, the impact that the form of a
writing system makes on concepts such as science, law, and religion must be very negligible
indeed.
References
Logan, Robert K. The Alphabet Effect. 1986.
Smart, Ninian. The World's Religions. 1989.
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