The Confucian Notion of Names from the Lens of Cognitive Psychology—— The Political Philosophy in Western ＆ Eastern Han Dynasties Revisited

From the lens of cognitive psychology,the Confucian theory on the rectification of names could be viewed as appeals to entrenchedethical/political paradigms substantially facilitating the process of producing moral judgments.In this sense,a local community can easily achieve its internal integrity by relying on this name-rectifying mechanism.However,as soon as the historical background of the Spring and Autumn Period,when Confucius firstly put forward the very theory of the rectification of names,was updated as that of Han Dynasty,the imperial structure of which left relatively small space for the autonomy of local communities,the original Confucian name-rectifying narrative turned out to be not so adaptive to new social environments with unexpected social complexity in an empire-scale.Though the discovery of same problem forced the Greek-Roman culture to embrace new social constitutions (like democracy and “rule by law”) encouraging “slow thinking” (in Kahneman’s sense),which leaves time to the falsifying procedures of certain claims,the ideological evolution of the Han Dynasty did take another route eventually,namely,to articulate previously assumed social norms as a systematical hierarchy to normalize everyone’s behaviors in the empire.However,the compulsoriness of these norms itself is based on the control of resources,and hence,resource-controllers’ own interests will inevitably undermine the fairness of the whole name-rectifying narrative,and thereby convert it into a rumor-inducing process.