School of Names (Logicians)

The claim

The relation between names and the things they name is not straightforward, and examining it produces results that ordinary speech cannot accommodate.

What it held

Gongsun Long's white horse argument is the school's monument and the source of its reputation for frivolity. Horse names a shape; white names a colour; white horse names something that neither term alone picks out. Therefore a white horse is not a horse.

Read as a claim about animals it is absurd. Read as a claim about how compound terms behave — whether their reference is the intersection of their parts, and whether identity statements are about terms or about things — it is a genuine problem, and it is roughly the problem Frege addressed twenty-two centuries later.

Hui Shi's ten theses are stranger still and survive only as a list in the Zhuangzi: the largest thing has nothing outside it, the smallest nothing inside; the sun at noon is setting; I go to Yue today and arrived yesterday; love all things equally, for heaven and earth are one body. They read as paradoxes about scale, time and identity, and without their arguments we cannot judge them.

The school had no successors. Chinese philosophy took a different route, and later thinkers mostly cited these arguments as examples of cleverness that produces nothing.

How it argued

Paradox and argument about the reference of terms, conducted in court debate where the ability to win an exchange had real consequences.

What it was arguing against

Ordinary usage, principally — the school worked by showing that common ways of speaking break under pressure.

Where it disagreed with itself

What the white horse argument is actually claiming. Modern interpretations differ over whether it is about mereology, about identity, or about mass and count terms.

Common misconceptions

That it is sophistry. Zhuangzi, who was Hui Shi's friend and mourned him as the only person worth talking to, treats the arguments as serious even while finding them useless.

How it began

The Warring States debating culture, in which persuasion was a professional skill and rulers kept disputers at court.

What became of it

Extinguished with the Qin unification. Its texts are almost entirely lost and its questions were not taken up.

Lasting influence

Almost none in China. Considerable in modern comparative philosophy, where it is the standing counterexample to the claim that classical Chinese thought had no interest in logic.

Why it still matters

Whether compound terms refer to the intersection of their components is a real question in semantics, and the school got there first by a long way.

Put another way

A word taken apart to see whether the pieces add up to what it names.

Where to start

The white horse dialogue with a modern commentary. It is two pages and needs about twenty of explanation.

The surprising bit

When Hui Shi died, Zhuangzi — who had spent years arguing against him — said that since the death of his opponent he had had nobody to talk to and nothing to sharpen himself against.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Confucianism (classical)

Parallel to

Megarian School

The verdict

The one Chinese school devoted to logic for its own sake, and the one nobody continued.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy