 The naturalistic epistemologies that prevailed in Western discourses were dealing with the external world (or objective reality), which was to a great extent independent from the subject of comprehension. Chinese approaches to knowledge can be called relational epistemologies, because they refer to relations. This applies not only to radical holistic epistemologies, which denied the notion of substance, but also to a number of contemporary theories which advocate a strict division between the subject and object of comprehension (see Xia 2000: 4)