Focusing on the debate over the sphericity of the earth in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this paper examines the process of the formation of factual knowledge, which often constitutes the order of the external world as natural, in a cross-cultural context.
My main arguments are as follows. First, trust plays an important role in knowledge transmission. Those who disagreed with the theory of the sphericity of the earth often dismissed the arguments of missionaries by simply saying that the foreigners were untrustworthy. On the contrary, Matteo Ricci had to cultivate literati’s trust by citing classics, mobilizing the endorsement of prominent figures and incorporating the theory of the round earth into astronomical instruments and calculating tools. Second, though people in different cultures may have incommensurable worldviews, this does not preclude the possibility of partial communication between different cultures. In the case of the debate over the sphericity of the earth, astronomical instruments and calculating tools partially bridged the cultural incommensurability. Those who adopted Western astronomical instruments and calculating tools employed these instruments and tools as a common measurement to understand the alien concept of the round earth. Third, alien concepts such as the four elements and the experience of navigation did not serve as effective cultural resources to convince Chinese literati of the spericity of the earth. Fourth, as a result, the legitimacy of factual knowledge such as the Western concept of the sphericity of the earth has to be reconstructed in an alien environment. The theory of the Chinese origin of Western learning was fabricated within such a context. Fifth, debate over factual knowledge has social and cultural implications. Thus, the debate over the sphericity of the earth involved not only how the phenomenon could be understood but also how the position of Chinese empire was to be located in the new cultural atlas. Sixth, the sphericity of the earth finally became common sense for the Chinese largely due to the political and cultural transformation of modern China. It is the modern educational system and a state which no longer relied on Confucian literati for its main cultural and bureaucratic force that imposed the spherical earth as a fact on the minds of the modern Chinese.
trust, Jesuits, Chinese origin of Western learning, Yang Guangxian, Mei Wending
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