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1. mist (ai@cawfee.club)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 21:58:30 JST mist

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   @hidden I'm not qualified to comment because I haven't read any "rhetoric" in Chinese, such as high school essays which is what they are talking about.
   
   I'll comment anyways :)
   
   The one Oriental example is from a Korean student (pic 1). The paper notes that the student is able to think abstractly and logically (in the Anglo way), because he's a math major (pic 2). So why does his "definition" not read like one?
   
   What jumps out to *me* is that the student is answering an "ought" instead of an "is". He is trying to explain why college education is "good", why "should" it exist. The Asian tendency to conflate morality with fact has been a bane in my own life. You see the same tendency with hardline conservatives - just ask any poastie to define "transgender."
   
   Another feature is the "grand" scale of the writing. It sounds absurd to our Western ears - for a definition of college education to venture into the origin of mankind, of civilization, of heaven and hell. The paper questions whether the student has any abstraction ability, but I'd say that he has too much (by Western standards)! This is the "inherent spirituality" of Asians which @diceynes talks about.
   
   Often, when talking with Chinese people about technical or philosophical things, I feel like they make a lot more connections than are rigorously justified. I'm not saying they are right or wrong. Disparate ideas seem to "snap together" more easily in a Chinese worldview.
   
   So I disagree with the paper. I don't think a "spiral" or "widening gyre" is typical of Asian thinking. That implies a kind of periodicity which I've never seen in thinking, although it is prominent in religion. The picture that instead comes to mind is the fediverse logo (pic 3).
   
   A related feature of Chinese rhetoric is that allusions to proverbs are extremely common. In contrast, English rhetoric is more self-contained - or think of math, where every proposition must be justified from a limited set of axioms. This feature, drawn to an extreme, is illustrated in the famous star trek episode Darmok.