Chapter 93 <White horse is not a horse>

A white horse is a horse, this is common sense that everyone knows.However, Gongsun Long, a thinker in the Warring States Period of our country, believed that a white horse is not a horse. He is famous for advocating that a white horse is not a horse.When Gongsun Long answered other people's question why a white horse is not a horse, he said many fallacies and repeatedly demonstrated that a white horse is not a horse.Among them is such an argument: Yellow horses and black horses are horses (I want a horse, and both yellow and black horses can be counted); A white horse is not a yellow horse or a black horse (I want a white horse, but the yellow and black horses don’t count);

Therefore, a white horse is not a horse. Argumentation is the form of reasoning.To make the argument right, the rules of reasoning must be obeyed, otherwise the argument is wrong.The above argument is a categorical syllogism, but it violates such a rule of syllogism: the concept that is not distributed in the premise must not be distributed in the conclusion. Because the concept of big horse as a predicate of affirmative judgment in the major premise is not distributed, that is, the major premise does not assert that yellow horses and black horses are all horses, but in the conclusion, the concept of horse as a predicate of negative judgment is Zhou Yan's, that is, the conclusion that the white horse is excluded from all horses.This violates the above-mentioned rules and makes the mistake of expanding the big term, and the conclusion that a white horse is not a horse cannot be deduced from the two existing premises.

From the perspective of dialectical logic, it is wrong to say that a white horse is not a horse, because it cuts off the connection between the individual and the general.From the perspective of dialectical logic, a white horse is an individual, which has its own special attribute besides the common attributes of horses, that is, white; a horse is a general, which summarizes the common characteristics of all horses.Lenin pointed out in "Philosophical Notes": Any individual (no matter what) is the general, that is, the individual contains the general, so a white horse is a horse.If the white horse is not a horse can be established, then the yellow horse, black horse, etc. are not horses.So where are the horses?

Finally, the fundamental mistake of a white horse not a horse is that it violates objective facts.It is said that once Gongsun Long rode a white horse to go out of the pass, but because he did not have a horse license, he was stopped by the guards and could not go out. This shows that facts are better than sophistry, and any sophistry will be exposed in the face of facts.