School of Names

Historical Background and Figures

The School of Names (名家, Mingjia), often translated as the “School of Logicians,” was a classical Chinese intellectual current active mainly during the Warring States period (5th–3rd centuries BCE). It formed part of the broader landscape of the Hundred Schools of Thought, alongside Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, and Legalism. Unlike some of these traditions, the School of Names never became a unified institution with canonical texts. It is instead a label applied by later historians to a cluster of thinkers preoccupied with issues of language, reference, and disputation.

The principal figures associated with the School of Names are:

• Hui Shi (Hui Shih): A traveling persuader and rival or interlocutor of Zhuangzi. He is remembered for a set of striking paradoxes and theses, such as “The greatest has nothing beyond it; it is called the great unity” and “I set off for Yue today and arrived yesterday.” These statements probe relativity in space, time, and perspective.

• Gongsun Long: Known primarily through the short text Gongsun Longzi, though its exact authorship and date are disputed. He is associated with fine-grained distinctions in terms, as in the famous thesis “a white horse is not a horse” (白馬非馬), which examines how qualifiers change the extension and intension of a term.

Later historians, especially in the Han dynasty, grouped such figures under the rubric “School of Names” because they engaged in bian (辯) – disputation, analysis, and the drawing of distinctions – and because they reflected systematically on the relation between names (ming) and actualities or things (shi).

Sources for the School of Names are fragmentary. Their views are preserved indirectly in texts like the Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, Xunzi, and the Mohist Canons, as well as in later compilations and commentaries. This indirect transmission has led to substantial scholarly debate about the precise doctrines and coherence of the school.

Core Doctrines: Names and Realities

The central concern of the School of Names was the relationship between names and realities—how words, categories, and classifications map (or fail to map) onto the world. This concern was not purely abstract; in Warring States China, correct naming was closely tied to political authority, ritual propriety, and legal order.

1. Names (ming) and actualities (shi)
   Thinkers of this trend explored how a name picks out its object and what happens when naming goes wrong. Problems such as whether a single thing can have multiple correct names, or whether one name can appropriately apply to many things, became central. Where Confucians spoke of the “rectification of names” (正名) with an ethical and political aim, the School of Names emphasized structural and logical consistency in the use of terms.

2. Distinctions and categories
   The school was deeply interested in drawing and refining distinctions, often by posing puzzling examples. Gongsun Long’s claim that “a white horse is not a horse” relies on distinguishing between “horse” as a general kind and “white horse” as a subset with an added qualifier. Proponents used such distinctions to show that what appears obvious in everyday language may conceal complex categorial issues.

3. Relativity and standpoint
   Hui Shi’s paradoxes highlight the relativity of spatial, temporal, and evaluative judgments. Statements about size, distance, or goodness change depending on one’s standpoint. Some scholars interpret these ideas as an early exploration of relational properties and comparative predication. Others see them as primarily rhetorical, used to challenge dogmatic claims to absolute knowledge.

4. Pragmatics of naming
   While concerned with semantic issues, the School of Names also paid attention to the pragmatic effects of speech in argumentation and persuasion. The power to redefine, split, or group concepts had clear political and legal implications in a world of competing states and itinerant advisors seeking patronage.

Paradox, Logic, and Influence

The School of Names is best known for its use of paradox. These paradoxes resemble, in some respects, both Greek sophistic puzzles and later problems in Western logic, though they developed independently within the Chinese cultural and philosophical context.

1. Famous paradoxes and puzzles

   • “A white horse is not a horse”: Interpreted variously as a study in predication, set theory-like extension, or the distinction between name and attribute.
   • Hui Shi’s theses on space and time, such as objects being both large and small or near and far, depending on the comparison class.
     These examples pushed contemporaries to examine the assumptions behind ordinary language and classification.

2. Relation to Mohist and other logics
   Later Mohists developed systematic discussions of inference, definition, and disputation in the Mohist Canons. While not themselves labeled “School of Names,” they shared many concerns, such as analyzing kinds (lei), similarity and difference, and valid patterns of reasoning. Some scholars see the School of Names and Mohist logic as overlapping or at least mutually influential strands within early Chinese reflection on reasoning and language.

3. Criticism and reception
   Many contemporaneous thinkers were ambivalent or critical.

   • Confucian critics such as Xunzi accused the logicians of engaging in clever but socially useless debates that obscured moral priorities.
   • Legalists like Han Fei acknowledged the importance of names and standards but rejected what they saw as overly subtle disputations that could undermine clear legal categories.
     The Zhuangzi presents Hui Shi as a friend and foil to Zhuangzi himself, suggesting both respect for Hui Shi’s ingenuity and skepticism about relying on disputation for ultimate insight.

4. Legacy in Chinese thought
   The School of Names never became an institutionalized tradition and largely disappeared as an explicit school after the Qin–Han unification. Nonetheless, its issues resurfaced in:

   • Ongoing debates about zhengming (rectification of names) in Confucian and Legalist contexts.
   • Later scholarly attention to philology and classification, especially in Han and subsequent dynasties.
   • Modern comparative philosophy, where the School of Names is often discussed alongside Western traditions of logic, philosophy of language, and analytic metaphysics.

In modern scholarship, interpretations vary. Some view the School of Names as a proto-logical movement that might have given rise to a more formal logic had historical conditions been different. Others emphasize its rhetorical and sophistic dimensions, suggesting that its primary function was to challenge complacent assumptions rather than to build systematic theory.

Despite fragmentary sources, the School of Names occupies an important place in the history of Chinese philosophy as a distinctive attempt to interrogate how language structures thought, practice, and social order. Its paradoxes continue to serve as focal points for debates about the nature of meaning, reference, and rational argument across cultural and philosophical traditions.