An interesting piece in the NYT Magazine on Sunday by Kwame Anthony Appiah.  He describes a new wrinkle in academic philosophy, experimental philosophy (or x-phi to those in the know), which is based on survey data and other evidence that tests or falsifies certain central propositions.  He tells us how alien this is to the world of armchair speculation that pervades philosophy:

…Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come
to define themselves by their disinclination to do so. The professional bailiwick
we’ve staked out is the empyrean of pure thought. Colleagues in biology have
P.C.R. machines to run and microscope slides to dye; political scientists have
demographic trends to crunch; psychologists
have their rats and mazes. We philosophers wave them on with kindly looks. We
know the experimental sciences are terribly important, but the role we prefer
is that of the Catholic priest presiding at a wedding, confident that his support
for the practice carries all the more weight for being entirely theoretical.
Philosophers don’t observe; we don’t experiment; we don’t measure; and we don’t
count. We reflect. We love nothing more than our “thought experiments,” but
the key word there is thought….

    Interestingly, one of the big ideas that the experimentalists are testing has a distinctly Confucian ring to it:

In one of the most famous arguments of postwar philosophy of language,
Saul Kripke addressed a question that had long preoccupied
philosophers: how do names refer to people or things? (The larger
question here is: How does language get traction on reality?) In a
theory that Bertrand Russell made canonical, a name is basically
shorthand for a description that specifies the person or thing in
question. Kripke was skeptical. He suggested that the way names come to
refer to something is akin to baptism: once upon a time, someone or
some group conferred the name on an object, and, through the causal
chains of history, we borrow that original designation.

      OK, the descriptivist versus causal debate among modern philosophers is not exactly the same as the Confucian concern with the rectification of names, but there are family resemblances.  It  seems to me that  Confucians, especially Xun Zi (Hsun  Tzu) comes closer to a descriptivist account – but I am getting in over my head philosophically.  Here’s this from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Xunzi’s nominalism must be understood, much as that of the Greek
Sophists, as a tropic rather than a metaphysical device. Nominalism of
the ‘rhetorical’ as opposed to the ‘logical’ or ‘atomistic’ variety
does not arise from a conviction that universals do not exist, or that
there are no abstract entities, or that there are no such things as
non-individuals. Xunzi’s rhetorical or linguistic nominalism is
essentially an anti-metaphysical and an anti-logical methodology that
is quite similar to the sophistic nominalisms of many of the early
Greek rhetoricians.

 Question for my philosopher friends out there: is rhetorical nominalism something akin to descriptivism?

     In any event, look what happened when the experimentalists tested Kirpe’s ideas:

Recently,
a team of philosophers led by Machery came up with situations that had the same
form as Kripke’s and presented them to two groups of undergraduates — one in New Jersey and another in Hong Kong. The Americans, it turned out, were significantly more likely
to give the responses that Kripke took to be obvious; the Chinese students had
intuitions that were consonant with the older theory of reference. Maybe this
relates to the supposed individualism of Westerners; maybe their concern that
we get …[a]… name right isn’t shared by the supposedly more group-minded
East Asians.

     So, the Hong Kong students had intuitions that were closer to the descriptivist account.  And maybe some part of the cultural difference between Chinese societies and America is an attenuated effect of Confucian rhetorical nominalism.  I know, I know: there has been a hell of a lot of cultural water over the modernization dam in the past two thousand years (even just the past two hundred years).  I would not say that Hong Kong, nor China for that matter, is now a "Confucian society."  Too much has changed, too much of the old ways and ideas is irrecoverably gone.  But, for all of that, at the very least Hong Kong students seem more open to a theory of language that is closer to (I think) a very old Confucian orientation.

     It should be noted, however, that a modern Confucian would not be an experimentalist in this regard.  Rather, he or she would share Appiah’s view of the new fangled approach:

…But — this is my own empirical observation — although experiments can
illuminate philosophical arguments, they don’t settle them.

…You can conduct more research to try to clarify matters, but you’re
left having to interpret the findings; they don’t interpret themselves.
There always comes a point where the clipboards and questionnaires and
M.R.I. scans have to be put aside. To sort things out, it seems,
another powerful instrument is needed. Let’s see — there’s one in the
corner, over there. The springs are sagging a bit, and the cushions are
worn, but never mind. That armchair will do nicely.