From words to meaning reflection on the white horse problem
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2020
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Haverford College. Department of Philosophy
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
White horse problem is a famous proposition in pre-Qin dynasty elaborated by Gongsun Long in 白马论, White Horse Dialogue. The reason that this problem is interesting to scholars is because that it might testify the existence of logic in ancient China, since it has widely been assumed that Chinese does not have logic at all. The mainstream now agrees that the problem is a logical deduction, not a paradox, and scholars have proposed their own methods to account for the legitimacy of it. Although they approach the problem from different aspects, that the dialogue is written in Chinese is a crucial yet often overlooked fact, especially in western academia. Therefore, the white horse problem might need to be regarded as an issue of philosophy of language at first, and of logic secondarily. Scholars speaking alphabet-based languages might unavoidably think that Chinese functions in a similar way in terms of expressing meaning, which fails to capture the particular phenomenology of Chinese. The outcome of such misleading thought would lead to a complete misunderstanding of the white horse problem.