Episode 26: The White Horse Dialogue: Language, Logic, and Categories in Early China

According to a speaker in a famous historical dialogue, "A white horse is not a horse." In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Lisa Indraccolo (Associate Professor, Tallinn University) to unpack one of the most intriguing discourses in early Chinese philosophy—the White Horse Dialogue from the Gongsun Longzi. Together, we explore what this paradoxical statement reveals about language, logic, and categorization in early China, from the connection between words and reality to the ways that set theory, semantics, and metaphysics might be used to help us understand this fascinating text.

Lisa Indraccolo's professional website.

Many thanks to The Hong Kong Ethics Lab for sponsoring this podcast series.

Want to continue the discussion? Need links to some of the sources mentioned? Go to the support page for this episode on Warp, Weft, and Way.

We thank Lena Li (LI La 李拉 ) for her expert editing and sound engineering. We also thank the blog Warp, Weft & Way for hosting the discussion for this episode.

Co-hosts:
Richard Kim's website
Justin Tiwald's website

Chapters

• 0:00 Part I -- Introduction
• 4:40 Part II -- The White Horse Dialogue
• 4:42 • Introducing Lisa Indraccolo
• 6:03 • Why European and North American sinologists rarely meet in person
• 13:21 • Introducing the Gongsun Longzi
• 17:01 • Section 1: Opening Exchange – Shape vs. Color
• 28:36 • Section 2: Generic Horse vs. White Horse
• 38:11 • The mass-noun hypothesis
• 57:28 • Section 3: The "Colorless Horse" Challenge
• 1:07:52 • Section 4: The Reductio Ad Absurdum Argument
• 1:09:58 • Is the dialogue just teasing people who conflate identity claims with subclass claims?
• 1:13:12 • Speculation about the aims of dialogues like this -- training, entertainment, and rectifying names
• 1:20:15 • Lisa's key takeaways: concrete universals, categories