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Indicating and Things

Less than 300 graphs long, the “Discourse on IndicatingThings,” has been the focus of intense interpretive attentionyet remains profoundly obscure. A reasonable conjecture is that itsauthor intended just this result. Interpreters have applied a varietyof approaches to crack this enigmatic text. Some import exoticphilosophical machinery; others resort to textual emendation. Despitetheir efforts, however, most accounts of the text are not clearlysuperior to the hypothesis that “Indicating” never fullymade sense in the first place. The text may well be an ancientpractical joke, one that still ensnares victims today, more than 2000years after Gongsun Long used it to bewilder audiences.

“Indicating Things” discusses the apparentlyself-contradictory thesis that “When no thing is not indicated,indicating is not indicating.” The interpretive problems beginwith the very structure of the text. It is not clear whether“indicating” comprises several arguments for this thesis,a dialogue between a sophist and an objector, or an argument for thethesis followed by a refutation. The opening statement, theparadoxical thesis, appears to be a syntactic contradiction. Theparsing of several lines near the beginning is uncertain. Themotivation for many of the steps in the argument is hard to see. Thekey term,zhi, roughly “pointing” or“indicating,” can be rendered as “finger,”“to point,” “to refer,” or“referent,” each of which works well as an Englishequivalent in some contexts, but not all. The text slides back andforth between verbal and nominal uses ofzhi, all the whileembedding them in complex strings of quantifiers and negations whosescope is often vague. On top of these difficulties, from thereputation associated with Gongsun Long, we should expect the text totrade in semantic ambiguity and to slip in a category mistake or two,the more to baffle and entertain the audience.

The following sample gives a taste of the original, leaving the keytermzhi (indicating, what is indicated) untranslated:

The world lackingzhi, things cannot be calledzhi.

Not being able to be calledzhi is notzhi.

Notzhi is no thing is notzhi.

The world lackingzhi and things not being able to be calledzhi is there not being anything that’s notzhi.

There not being anything that’s notzhi is no thing isnotzhi.

[Therefore] No thing is notzhi iszhi not beingzhi.

The text opens with the claim that “No thing is notzhi, yetzhi is notzhi.” Someinterpreters identifyzhi with a Western, often Platonic,philosophical notion such as meaning, class, property, or universal.The opening claim, for instance, might be rendered “Everyparticular instantiates a universal, but universals do not instantiateuniversals.” Such interpretations are unconvincing, however, forthey attempt to make sense of the text by cutting it off from theintellectual context that provides the content of its terms. AncientChinese theories of language as presented by the Mohists, Xunzi, theAnalects, andThe Annals of Lü Buwei employ noconcept corresponding to meaning, property, or universal. Moreover,they clearly usezhi to mean simply “indicate” or“refer” as a verb and “what is indicated” or“referent” as a noun (cf. Graham 1989: 91, Hansen 1992:259–61).

One interpretation of the thesis consistent with the ancient Chineseintellectual context is that it concerns a paradoxical feature of“all-inclusive” general terms such as ‘things’or ‘the world’. The extension of such terms includeseverything there is, so when we use them, “no thing is notpointed to.” But precisely because their scope includeseverything, they do not distinguish their referents from anythingelse. So “indicating is not indicating,” since byreferring to everything, such terms fail to point anything out fromanything else. Graham develops an interpretation along roughly theselines (1989: 91ff.). He proposes, partly on the basis of clues in theZhuangzi andLiezi, that “IndicatingThings” concerns the issue of how the word ‘world’functions as a name. According to Chinese theories of language, namesdesignate things by distinguishing them from other things. But since‘world’ refers to the whole comprising everything, itdoesn’t distinguish anything from other things. Reading thesample passage quoted above along these lines yields an interpretationroughly like the following:

There being no indicating the world, things cannot be called theindicated.

Not being able to be called the indicated is not the indicated.

Not the indicated is no thing is not the indicated.

There being no indicating the world and things not being able to becalled the indicated is there not being anything that’s not theindicated.

There not being anything that’s not the indicated is no thing isnot the indicated.

[Therefore] No thing is not the indicated is indicating not beingindicating.

      (Translation modified from Graham 1989: 92.)

We can tentatively understand this as follows. The passage assumes theclaim, previously established, that the world can’t be pointedout from other things, because it is not a thing in itself distinctfrom the things that constitute it. The text claims that if the worldcan’t be indicated in this way, then neither can things. Then itmoves, in obscure steps, from that claim to the paradoxical conclusionof the last line. Perhaps the point is that when we refer to theworld, we refer to everything: no thing is not indicated. Yet inreferring to the world, we do not distinguish it from anything, soindicating it is not indicating anything. The steps in the reasoningare confusing, however, and their justification murky. In the thirdline above, for instance, why is “not the indicated”considered equivalent to “no thing is not the indicated”?One would think it ought to be equivalent to “allthings are not the indicated.”

The core theme of Graham’s interpretation is plausible, groundedas it is in the context of ancient Chinese philosophy of language. Onhis approach, the text concerns a category mistake: the error ofdemanding that, in addition to collectively indicating all the partsthat constitute a whole, we also be able to indicate the whole initself, as if it were a thing of the same order as the parts. Themistake would be parallel to that in Gilbert Ryle’s well-knownexample of someone being given a campus tour, shown the classrooms,library, administration building, and dormitories, and then asking tosee the university as well. This interpretive approach explains thefollowing passage particularly well:

There being no indicating the world arises from things each having aname and not being deemed the indicated.

Though they’re not deemed the indicated, we say they’rethe indicated; this is collecting together the not deemed theindicated.

It’s inadmissible to move from there being the not deemed theindicated to there not being the not deemed the indicated.…

Moreover, indicateds are what the world collects together.

There being no indicating the world, we can’t say there’sno indicating things.

On a Graham-style interpretation, this passage refutes the paradoxwith which the text opens. Each kind of thing has its own name, suchas ‘ox’ or ‘horse’. No distinct thing or kindof thing is deemed ‘the world’. Hence we cannot indicatethe world as distinct from other things. But though no thing in theworld is deemed or named ‘the world’—there is no onething or kind of thing specifically indicated by the name ‘theworld’—we nevertheless say that ‘the world’refers to all things. In doing so, we collect together all of thethings in the world and “indicate” them jointly. So thereare things that are referred to by ‘the world’ but are notdeemed ‘the world’; ‘the world’ is not theirname, and they are not specifically deemed what is indicated by‘the world’. But it is illegitimate to claim on that basisthat there’s nothing that is not deemed what’s indicatedby ‘the world’. Rather, ‘the world’ is thename of the sum of everything. Moreover, though ‘theworld’ doesn’t indicate something distinct from otherthings, we can’t say there’s no indicating things. In thatcase, the paradox is wrong to claim that “indicating is notindicating.”

Even on this approach, the text remains so full of contradictions,circular arguments, and logical gaps that it is next to impossible tointerpret the argument with assurance. A satisfactory interpretationmust provide an explanation of the text demonstrably superior to thatof rival readings. While some interpretations of “IndicatingThings” can be ruled out as inferior to alternatives, so manyuncertainties surround the text that it is difficult to see how anyone reading could be shown to be clearly better than plausible rivals.

(For other recent discussions of “Indicating Things,” see Liu 2020and Vierheller 2020.)

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