Jonathan Barnes reviews The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece by Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin:

This is the difference to which the title of the book alludes: the Chinese were collaborative, the Greeks competitive; in China agreement was sought out or else assumed to exist, in Greece rivalry flourished and was promoted; the Chinese contemplated, the Greeks reasoned.

Greek thought is marked by "strident adversariality" and "rationalistic aggressiveness". The turbulent Greeks had to make their way in the "competitive hurly-burly of the Hellenic world", whereas in gentle China an intellectual's concern "was first and foremost persuading a ruler or his surrogates to want their advice". When Chinese meets Chinese, then comes no tug-of-war.

...the facts of Greek intellectual life "favoured systematically exploring the arguments on both sides of fundamental questions" (in order to prove your adversaries wrong), something which "may well have contributed to a readiness not merely to air but to maintain the contradictory of what might pass as a commonsensical view".

And on the other hand, a Greek was driven to secure his own claims from refutation: he must prove them to be true; he must ride hell-bent for incontrovertibility - hence the axiomatic deductive method of doing things and the scientific strategy of, say, Euclid.

In China there was no raucous marketplace. The Chinese were generally writing for the emperor. Hence they "did not feel a need for incontrovertibility, the driving force in... Greek investigations". Rather, "what corresponds in China to the Greek authority of demonstration was the authority of sagely origin", so that "scientific pursuits in China... did not aim at stepwise approximations to an objective reality but at recovery of what the archaic sages already knew".

Moreover, writing for the emperor's eyes "encouraged precision in moral, social and political categories, but it did not motivate an equal fastidiousness with regard to the foundations of knowledge"; and at the same time, in China, "overt, reciprocal polemic of a kind that might have pushed epistemological problems to the fore was rare".