Gongsun Long

School Of Names · East Asia · 320 to 250 BCE

Chinese thinker of the School of Names who argued about words and things. One claim was that a white horse is not a horse.

What it is

Gongsun Long (died 250 BCE; born about 320 or 325 BCE, as the sources differ) was a Chinese thinker of the School of Names, the group sometimes called the Logicians or Dialecticians, who analysed the meaning of words in the Warring States period. He is best remembered for the argument that "a white horse is not a horse".

His writings were gathered in a book called the Gongsunlongzi, of which only six of the original fourteen chapters survive.

The main ideas

Names and what they pick out. He examined the meaning of words and what they name.
A white horse is not a horse. In his best known argument he held that "white horse" and "horse" are not the same thing.
A school of argument. He belonged to a school of thinkers concerned with analysing words and their meaning.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine being asked to bring a horse and returning with a white one, then being told that you were asked for a horse, not a white horse. The puzzle is whether the two words ask for the same thing. Gongsun Long used this sort of case to make people look closely at what a word covers and what it leaves out. This is an illustration of the puzzle, not a passage from his book.

Books and moments

The Gongsunlongzi is the collection of his writings. Only six of its fourteen chapters have survived.
The White Horse Dialogue is the best known of them, the discourse on why a white horse is not a horse.

Questions and criticism

What does the claim mean. One account says he held that a white horse is a particular kind of horse and not the general idea of a horse. The argument has been interpreted in a number of ways, and the pages describe it differently. It is fair to ask which reading best fits what he meant, and whether a claim that sounds false at first can still be useful for showing how words work.
Words and things. It is fair to ask whether a word can be told apart from the thing it names, and what a name adds when it narrows a thing down, which is the kind of question his school took up.
Logic or trick. It is fair to ask whether the dialogue is serious logic or a clever show of sophistry.
His date of birth. Sources place his birth about 320 or 325 BCE, so even this date is not settled.

Close neighbours

The pages on Mozi, Zhuangzi and Han Feizi cover other thinkers of ancient China.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

Mozi · The later Mohists and the School of Names worked on the logic of names in the same period and debated one another. (scholars disagree about this link)

Sources we used

Gongsun Long · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
Gongsun Long · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 29 October 2026