School of Names

The School of Names (Mingjia) is a current of ancient Chinese philosophy active during the Warring States period, associated chiefly with Hui Shi and Gongsun Long, that focused on the relationship between names (ming) and the realities (shi) they designate, probing paradoxes of identity, similarity and difference that other classical Chinese schools treated as marginal or merely rhetorical. Gongsun Long's best-known argument, "a white horse is not a horse," used the logical distinction between a general kind and a kind qualified by an attribute to challenge naive assumptions about how naming and classification track the world, while Hui Shi's surviving paradoxes explore the relativity of size, sameness and spatial position. Because rectifying names (zhengming) to match realities was also a serious ethical and political concern for Confucians and Legalists, the School of Names' logical puzzles were read by contemporaries as bearing on the proper ordering of language, government and social roles rather than as pure abstraction. The school left no organized institutional lineage and few surviving texts, and its arguments were largely dismissed or absorbed as curiosities by the Confucian tradition that came to dominate Chinese thought, but its logical and semantic puzzles are now recognized as an early and sophisticated Chinese contribution to the philosophy of language.