A white horse is not a horse. He pushed language until it broke, to see what it was made of.
Gongsun Long belonged to the School of Names, the nearest thing classical China had to formal logic. His most notorious argument claims that a white horse is not a horse, because the term white horse picks out something the term horse does not. Critics called it sophistry; defenders saw a genuine probe into how words, kinds, and things hang together. Working amid the debating halls of the age, he forced his contemporaries to notice that the way we name the world is not the same as the world, a distinction Chinese thought never entirely forgot.
“A white horse is not a horse.”
Born in the state of Zhao, he became a leading voice of the School of Names.
Argued that a white horse is not a horse, probing how names, kinds, and things hang together.