When A White Horse Is Not A Horse - Difficulties of Interpretation

Difficulties of Interpretation

The syntax, semantics, and logic of the White Horse Dialogue are ambiguous in the Classical Chinese original and thorny in English translation.

Chinese Baima fei ma 白馬非馬 syntactically hinges upon the negative fei 非 "not, is not; no, negative; oppose; wrong". The Classical construction "A fei B" "A非B" can ambiguously mean either "A is not a member of the class B" or "A is not identical to B". Interpreting this equivocation fallacy, A.C. Graham says this "white horse" vs. "horse" paradox plays upon the ambiguity of whether "is" means:

1. "Is a member of the class (x)"
2. "Is identical to (x)"

Another example involves the widely-known "Happiness of Fish" dialogue in Zhuangzi (17, tr. Watson 1968:188-9) contrasts both meanings. Huizi says "You're not a fish — how do you know what fish enjoy?" and Zhuangzi replies "You're not I, so how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?"

Beyond the inherent semantic ambiguities of Baima fei ma, the first line obscurely asks ke hu 可乎 "Can it be that …?". This dialogue could be an attempted proof that a white horse is not a horse, or a question if such a statement is possible, or both. Van Norden suggests "that the issue is not whether it is always true that 'a white horse is not a horse,' but whether it is possible for it to be true."

Derk Bodde, in his 1952 translation of Feng Youlan's History of Chinese Philosophy, followed Fung's Platonistic interpretation of the paradox:

Strictly speaking, names or terms are divided into those that are abstract and those that are concrete. The abstract term denotes the universal, the concrete term the particular. The particular is the denotation, and the universal the connotation, of the term. In western inflected languages there is no difficulty in distinguishing between the particular ('white' or 'horse') and the abstract ('whiteness' or 'horseness'). In Chinese, however, owing to the fact that the written characters are ideographic and pictorial and lack all inflection, there is no possible way, as far as the form of individual words is concerned, of distinguishing between abstract and concrete terms. Thus in Chinese the word designating a particular horse and that designating the universal, 'horseness,' are written and pronounced in the same way. Similarly with other terms, so that such words as 'horse' and 'white', being used to designate both the concrete particular and the abstract universal, thus hold two values.

Despite these interpretative difficulties with the White Horse Dialogue, many philosophers and sinologists have analyzed it. For instance, see Hansen; Graham; Thompson; Harbsmeier; and Van Norden.