White Horse Dialogue
It appears in the Warring States period text Gongsun Longzi attributed to Gongsun Long, grouped under the philosophical School of Names in later taxonomies.
[2] Parts of the dialogue are dislocated and a small number of words are theorized to have been lost early in the text's transmission history.
Other Gongsun Longzi chapters discuss "white horse"-related concepts of: jian 堅 'hard; hardness', and bai 白 'white; whiteness', ming 名 'name; term', shi 實 'solid; true, actual; fact, reality', the abstract zhi 指 'finger; pointing; designation; universal' (like "whiteness"), and the concrete wu 物 'thing; object; particular' (like "a white horse").
A common misunderstanding is that this paradox arises due to the lack of articles in the Chinese language.
While the absence of articles in Chinese can make the interpretation of phrases more challenging, this paradox serves as an entry point for more profound philosophical explorations rather than being a straightforward result of Chinese grammar.
Essentially, this paradox explores the ways in which humans categorize and conceptualize "things" in minds and through language.
'"[5] An alternative interpretation is offered in Feng Youlan's A History of Chinese Philosophy:[6] Strictly speaking, names or terms are divided into those that are abstract and those that are concrete.
In Chinese, however, as the written characters are ideographic and pictorial and lack all inflection, there is no possible way, as far as the form of individual words is concerned, of distinguishing between abstract and concrete terms.
Similarly with other terms, so that such words as 'horse' and 'white', being used to designate both the concrete particular and the abstract universal, thus hold two values.However, there are recent histories of Chinese philosophy that do not subscribe to Feng's interpretation.
Other contemporary philosophers and sinologists who have analyzed the dialogue include A. C. Graham,[7] Chad Hansen,[8] Cristoph Harbsmeier,[9] Kirill Ole Thompson,[1] and Bryan W. Van Norden.
The Liezi, which lists and criticizes the paradoxes of Gongsun Long as "perversions of reason and sense", explains "'A white horse is not a horse' because the name diverges from the shape.
