While growing attention has been paid in recent years to the logicalinsights and contributions of philosophers of other major traditionsof early China, particularly those of theSchool of Names, scholarship on early Chinese views on logic and language still tendsto concentrate on the contributions of the school ofMohism, which played a central role in the debates of philosophers of allmajor schools of thought during China’s Warring States period(479–221 BCE). The Mohists helped to critically refine earlyChinese conceptions of the content and function of logic and languagein relation to their aspirations for developing a comprehensiveethical theory about the proper governance of the state and of theindividual’s role within it. Arguably, much of theMohists’ motivation for developing this theory should becredited to those whom the Mohists themselves identified as theirphilosophical adversaries or antagonists, and this point extends tothe determination they exhibited in developing an explicitphilosophical theory of logical reasoning. Among those adversarieswere the followers ofConfucius, whose appeals to authority and established traditions for thejustification of ethical views the Mohists found objectionable, andthe advocates ofDaoism, whose views appeared to undermine the possibility of any invariableand objective standards for ethical conduct. But quite possibly a morecompelling influence, at least in regards to the development of Mohistlogic, sprang from the medley of thinkers and dialecticians who havetraditionally been associated with the School of Names. While noexplicit theory of logical reasoning is attributed to this school, thethinkers associated with it had a reputation for unexampled deftnessin the practice of dialectics and argumentation, and are regarded bymany scholars today as among early China’s most subtlepractitioners of logic (Fung 2020a). On the other hand, these thinkerswere also derided by their contemporaries, including by the Mohists,for their sophistry, for their dispositions to muddle and confuse, andfor their apparent desire to obscure the proper use of language.Whether masters of logical reasoning or merely performers offallacious dialectics, they were taken seriously enough by theiropponents to be regarded as threats to the order, stability andharmony of society. The later Mohists, in particular, whose views onlogic and language occupy the greater part of this entry, framed manyof their own arguments in ways that are plausibly interpreted asresponses to their views, and probably many of the laterMohists’ own logical and linguistic insights are owed to thevery puzzles and frustrations they experienced in their efforts tosupplant these views with the honest integrity of more rigorous andtranspicuous ideas.

It is somewhat difficult to distinguish the Mohists’ logicalinsights from their views on language in part because they made noattempt at investigating formal logic independently of their interestsin analyzing the semantics of the terms of language (ming, or“names”). They developed a clear theory of inference, andsupported this theory with versions of basic principles we wouldrecognize today as central to the study of logic, but argued that therules governing inference are partly determined by the semantics ofindividual terms and terms in combination, as opposed to rules merelyoperating on an argument’s logical form. It is also difficult todistinguish the Mohists’ attempts at offering a descriptive account ofthe content and function of language from their normative views aboutthe roles names should be expected to play if they are to contributeto the elevation of human character and proper conduct in society.These normative views were held more broadly in early China, and theyare especially clear in the writings of Xunzi, a Confucian scholar ofthe late Warring States period who attempted to assimilate the keyinsights of the Mohists on language and logic into a general Confuciantheory of ethics (Lin 2011). In Book 22 of theXunzi(“Correct Naming”), he explains:

When with differences in expression and divergence in thought wecommunicate with each other, and different things are obscurelyconfounded in name or as objects, the noble and the base will not beclarified, the same and different will not be distinguished; in suchcases intent will inevitably suffer from frustration and obstruction.Therefore the wise made for them apportionments and distinctions andinstituted names to point out objects, in the first place in order toclarify noble and base, secondly to distinguish same and different.When noble and base are clarified, and same and differentdistinguished, intent is not hampered by failure to communicate andaction does not suffer from frustration and obstruction. This is thepurpose of having names. (tr. Graham 1989)

The presupposition here is that people cannot live togethercooperatively or harmoniously if they cannot communicate with oneanother effectively—if they are inadvertently calling differentthings by the same names or the same things by different names. Theywill think they are agreeing or disagreeing with one another when theyaren’t, and their intentions will be frustrated or blocked– notably, not by the conflict of wills that would result fromambition, greed or selfishness (which might be true apart from this),but by something more basic: the dumb incompetence of failing to uselanguage properly. The solution, accordingly, is to determine thecorrect use of language, the proper conditions under which its termsare used. “Is this object a horse?” “Is this ruler aking?” As Xunzi indicates, part of the method here hinges on thedescriptive program of comparing objects in question to others thatare referred to by the same names and making judgments of similarityor difference. But Xunzi goes deeper. To make a judgment of similarityor difference, certain criteria must be used. But what, in turn,justifies these criteria? Xunzi insists that the analysis of languagemust also “clarify the noble and base,” and this seemsintended as an answer to just this question; it explains why heidentifies it as hisfirst basic purpose in the analysis ofterms. For only then is one in a position to undertake the secondpurpose of distinguishing the same and the different. That is, we knowthat a judgment of similarity or difference is correct when itdistinguishes the noble from the base, the good from the bad.Xunzi’s prioritizing of these two basic purposes suggests thatthe ultimate aim of the investigation of language is to guidebehavior, to serve the normative function of providing standards forclarifying communicative intentions in a way that establishes ajustificatory framework for resolving ethical disputes. Such a viewseems to have been held widely in early China; it is suggested in theAnalects of Confucius in regards to the ordering of names,and it is clearly evident as a general orientation in the writings ofthe Mohists, who hoped that the analysis of language would help toreveal semantic distinctions relevant to proper ethical conduct. Theresult was an inevitable blending of disinterested analysis anddefinitional stipulation, insofar as it was held that language as amedium for human discourse must not be neutral with respect to ethicalaims.

Given the great abundance of literature explicitly devoted tointerpreting and reconstructing early Chinese views on language, it isimpractical to attempt any exhaustive treatment here. To maintaincommon points of focus, attention will be restricted to those issuesthat appear to have obvious bearing on early Chinesephilosophers’ interest in logic, specifically as it pertains totheories of reason and inference, generally construed. Our mainquestions are: How did early Chinese philosophers’ views aboutthe content and function of language contribute to their understandingof logic as the study of valid or correct inference? Secondly, in whatway did their logical investigations influence their views aboutlanguage? Arguably, from the logician’s point of view, thegreatest insights of early Chinese philosophers’ studies oflogic and language are to be found in the later Mohists’ studiesof intensionality, which appear to have influenced not only theirspecific theories on the efficacy of argumentation but also their coreideas about the nature and purpose of language. Further remarksaddress central points of disagreement the Mohists had with theirDaoist critics, particularly as evident in the writings ofZhuangzi, and Xunzi’s reinterpretation of Mohist logic from the vantagepoint of his Confucian theory of ethics.

• 1. Background and General Considerations
• 2. Confucius and the Ordering of Names
• 3. Mohist Views on Logic and Language
  • 3.1 Basic Logical Notions
  • 3.2 Principles of Reason and Inference
  • 3.3 Methods of Application and Problems
  • 3.4 The Mohist Linguistic Turn
  • 3.5 Investigations of Intensionality
• 4. Daoist Replies and Critique of Logic
• 5. Xunzi’s Confucian Appropriation of Mohist Logic
• 6. Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
  • Primary Sources
  • Additional Sources
  • General Surveys of Classical Chinese Thought:
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Background and General Considerations

It is generally recognized today that Chinese philosophy in itsclassical period was much more preoccupied with articulating andsupporting philosophical positions through sustained rationaldiscourse than was previously assumed. Part of the reason for thisoversight in decades past was due to the loss or neglect of ancienttexts critical to the understanding of early Chinese ideas on languageand logic, particularly the writings of the later Mohists, whodeveloped a sophisticated school of philosophical and scientificthought in the third century BCE, but whose writings were rediscoveredby philologists only in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Inaddition to meticulously developing scientific theories aboutgeometry, mechanics, optics, and economics, the later Mohists alsoarticulated detailed philosophical theories in areas we now recognizeas logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.Their writings on language and logic are particularly noteworthy,since the later Mohists appeared to treat these disciplines asembodying a subject matter worthy of independent study, and theydevoted more attention to issues about language and logic than anyother school of thought of the same period. One finds in later Mohistwritings, for instance, the only detailed exposition ofbian(disputation), the style of argumentation or debate likely practicedin all major schools of thought in ancient China (Fraser 2013). Thelater Mohists aspired to become more proficient practitioners ofbian by taking it more conscionably as an object of study,and carefully articulating, in the context of a general theory, theterms, rules, and methods for its practice.

A second reason for this oversight is in the fact that those writingsof classical Chinese philosophers that did largely survive thevicissitudes of history—particularly the major works of Daoistslike Zhuangzi and Laozi, but also those writings attributable toConfucius and his philosophical descendants—tend to embody whatappear to be unfavorable appraisals of, or at least alternatives to,philosophical methods that rely heavily on suppositions about thepower of discursive rationality at establishing true ethical,metaphysical, or scientific principles. Such methods take for grantedthe aptitude of the human intellect to logically deduce true,informative statements about particular objects, events, or states ofaffairs from general propositions, or establish correctgeneralizations by induction from particular instances, a practiceless self-consciously avowed in most philosophical traditions in Chinathat were (unlike Mohism) stimulated by centuries of well-establishedsociocultural practices. Arguably, much of the interest we see in thestudy of logic in early Western philosophy was stimulated by thesupposition of a dichotomy between appearance and reality, whichprompted philosophers to wonder whether judgments or theories aboutwhat appears to us do or do not correspond to the structure or contentof a mind-independent, objective reality. The obvious case is Plato,whose analysis of Forms was inspired by the methods of Euclideangeometry with the intention that it be carried out in a realm ofabstraction largely unimpeded by the diffuse and problematic contentof sense experience. Aristotle lamented the fact that Plato’smethods suffered from limited applicability to the varieties ofexperiential phenomena, believing instead that the content ofperception does not pose any special problems for the reliability ofjudgment, but he retained a fundamental interest in the theory ofrepresentation and hoped that his system of logic would provide propernormative standards for drawing inferences among the categories we useto identify things.

Most Chinese philosophers who lived after the unification of China in221 BCE, which was largely dominated by Confucianism after a briefperiod of suppression initiated by the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, donot appear to have had any special distrust of the content of thesenses, or were not responding to those who did, and so were notcompelled to view the veracity of representation as a problem ofsignificance. Consequently, scholars have variously characterizedChinese philosophical thought in ways that contrast it with Westernpreoccupations with discursive rationality. It is common, for example,to view early Chinese philosophers as largely preoccupied withproblems centering on the proper governance of society and howcitizens ought to conduct themselves within it. As much as in anyother major philosophical tradition, the early Chinese philosopherswere concerned with questions about what kind of life is worth livingand what things, circumstances, or actions are to be regarded asultimately valuable. Their philosophical investigations led them toconceptualize ideals of right conduct, appropriate behavior, andsocial propriety (Hall and Ames 1987). But the methods they employedto establish these ideals tended to emphasize reasoning by examplefrom the actions or conduct of key moral exemplars rather thandeducing particular judgments of practical action from generalprinciples. For this reason they were more preoccupied withidentifying proper normative standards by which to judge thesimilarity or resemblance of a thing or action with that of a chosenstandard. Arguably, this encouraged a conception of logic based mostlyon methods of inductive, analogical reasoning, given their specialconcern with the problem of resemblance, and this view is borne out toa large extent in the Mohists’ more self-conscious appraisals oftheir own methodology and in the modes of reasoning they use toillustrate it (Yuan 2012; Fraser 2013).

Moreover, the Mohists’ term for reasoning or disputation,bian, appears in most other major philosophical texts of theClassical (or pre-Han) era, suggesting broad similarities in use. Theterm is generally understood to mean “distinguishing” or“drawing distinctions”, although in its more specific useswe find it variously understood as a process of conceptualizingsimilarities and differences, discriminating objects in acts ofperception, appealing to normative linguistic standards for namingobjects, and using the normative criteria of correct naming as aproper guide to action (Fraser 2013). At the heart of these uses thereappears to be a basic preoccupation with the philosophical importanceof identifying the similarities and differences of things and events,a process largely determined by cognitive skills associated withpattern recognition. Unlike Aristotle, however, whose methods ofclassifying things depended on assumptions about metaphysically realessences (independent of human agency), the early Chinese philosophersput the burden of correct discrimination at least partly on what theydeemed to be appropriate normative standards, based on the efficacywith which they were thought to guide action. That is to say, whichsimilarities and differences they thought were relevant depended onwhether they were thought to guide action in a way that is consistentwith general moral principles about right conduct. A central purposeof the ethical investigations of the Mohists, for example, was toidentify general standards of judgment that would reliably andimpartially guide action in a way that produces beneficialconsequences, and they appealed tobian as the principalhuman faculty for determining how these standards would play out inspecific cases. Practical reasoning was conceived as an ability torespond appropriately on the basis of inferences drawn by analogy fromvarious preconceived exemplars or models of moral action. According toBook 4 of theMozi:

Those in the world who perform tasks cannot do without models(fa) and standards. There is no one who can accomplish theirtask without models and standards. Even officers serving as generalsor ministers, they all have models; even the hundred artisansperforming their tasks, they too all have models.

On the other hand, the Mohists do not seem to have found any reason todoubt the assumption that this appeal to normative standards ofdiscrimination (standards relevant to the efficacy of moral action) isstill grounded in the identification of real similarities anddifferences among objects, patterns of experience or perception thatcould in principle be identified by any competent individual withdependable cognitive, perceptual, and linguistic capacities.

This way of summarizing the Mohist philosophical enterprise does leaveunanswered important questions about the ultimate justification ofethical claims. Early Chinese thought does not provide an explicitdistinction between fact and value, so it is a matter of controversyto determine which has epistemic priority in Mohist thought—thenormative standards by which the correct uses of language guidebehavior, or the evaluations of reason that are determined by ourability to ascertain real similarities and differences in perceptionand thought. This problem is perhaps less controversial in theinterpretation of Confucian philosophy because the priority ofnormative standards in the Confucian program of ordering names isattested by clear examples. It is evident, for instance, in section1B/8 of theMencius, which acknowledges the admissibility ofkilling a wicked ruler in spite of the prohibition of regicide, on thepremise that this ruler is notreally a king (or does notwarrant the name “king”). The Confucian view is thatanyone whois a kingought to act like one;otherwise the name is unwarranted. Hence, correct naming is also aprescription for conduct.

One can appreciate, in this regard, why the Confucians insisted thatthe correct use of names is a matter for authority to decide, becauseonly an appropriate authority can justify how one ought to act. Thisauthority was assumed to be found in the forms of ritual propriety(li) that were the common ingredients of establishedtraditions, or in the judgments or discretions of “virtuousgentlemen” or other exemplars of moral conduct, and in thisregard was considered to be – if not universal – then at leastconstant, dependable and unifying. But the Mohists were skeptical, nothesitating to point out that tradition was not a strong enoughcriterion for proper action. They knew, for instance, that socialpractices vary and conflict dramatically across time and place; howcan they all be “righteous”? Something independent ofthese practices had to decide to serve as an objective criterion ofmoral conduct. It is noteworthy that the Mohists themselves did appealto an authority of sorts, in the abstract, quasi-godlike entity theyreferred to as Heaven (tian), which they deemed to be themost perfect moral agency. They referred to this agency as “Heaven’s intention” (tian zhi), believing that it could serve as the basis of anauthority independent of the variable and opposing opinions and socialpractices of people. But in later Mohist writings, particularly theMohist Canons, we find no mention of this agency, possiblybecause the Mohists found that their conception of it was notsubstantive enough to discriminate things at the level ofphilosophical precision that they sought to address. Whatever thecase, they essentially divorced the justification of action from anyauthoritative individual or entity that would otherwise serve toestablish it, and this raised new philosophical concerns about how thenorms of conduct and language use were to be decided. Central toMohist ethical thought are the principles of utility (an action isright depending on whether its consequences are useful) and universallove (the usefulness of an action is determined by the impartialbeneficence it contributes to public welfare). So, according to theMohists, the moral description of an action depends partly (indeed,largely) on whether it contributes to these ends, or whether theseends may be judged appropriately analogous to the consequences of theactions of a moral exemplar. But the judgment of similarity here mayitself depend on preexisting normative standards of correct useindependently of considerations of utility. Safe to say that since theMohist Canons do not explicitly address the issue of convention inlanguage, or its role in the justification of principles of naming,the Mohists were probably undecided on this point. Not until thephilosophy of Xunzi do we find a clear consideration of this issue,but Xunzi avoids the hard questions it exposes by deferring to themore fastidious judgments of an intellectual elite.

It should be noted that those who rejected the Mohists’ viewsoften concentrated their objections on the logical presuppositions ofthe Mohists’ methodology of disputation by pointing outcounterexamples to the kinds of analogical inferences that the Mohistswere inclined to take for granted. A.C. Graham, for instance, who didmore than any other Western philosopher at reconstructing andanalyzing Mohist philosophical doctrines about language and logic inthe early decades following their rediscovery by Chinese philologists,nevertheless described the opposing Daoist philosophies (particularlyas espoused in theZhuangzi) as “anti-rational”,representative of an “assault on reason”, a“rejection”, and even “mockery”, of logic(Graham 1989). Yet some argue that a great many of the Daoistobjections one finds in theZhuangzi are motivated more by ageneral skepticism about the possibility of identifying invariablestandards of discrimination in language than about ineradicabledefects in the very human capacity for reason. One can be a skeptic,for instance, about the role of necessity in reference without havinganything disparaging to say about our ability to evaluate theconsistency of a theory on logical grounds or reject it by the methodofreductio ad absurdum. A number of scholars have evenclaimed that Daoism, in particular, is not the anti-rationalphilosophy it has been taken to be, but in some ways an attempt atcarrying the methods of reason to their ultimate limits, much asWittgenstein in hisTractatus attempts to tease out theboundary of the sayable through sustained rational reflection.Zhuangzi, for all his skepticism about the utility of natural languageas a medium for the representation of truth and inclinations towardsmysticism, might nonetheless have still venerated reason,independently of language, as the principal mode of thought throughwhich one is able to discern right conduct in accordance with the Dao(or Way). This view is controversial, but scholars have not beenaverse to it (cf. the general view of Wing-tsit Chan: “He ismystical, but at the same time he follows reason as the leadinglight”, 1963: 177), and there seems to be an increasing interestin its viability (e.g., Alt 1991). Evidence for it is considered insection 4 below.

It is clear that even if Daoism and other schools of thoughtpositionedvis-à-vis Mohism in ancient China were insome sense “anti-rational” in orientation, their viewswere not developed in isolation but were in fact a consequence ofprolonged social contact and interaction with Mohist philosophers, andso could not have developed without being amply informed by theiropponents’ methods and views. This fact alone demands cautionwhen making general statements about the logical and linguistic viewsof early Chinese philosophers working outside the Mohist tradition.One can easily discern an increasing sophistication in methods ofdisputation in traditions that did not exhibit a great interest inthematizing language and logic independently of other philosophicalpursuits, and this should not surprise us given the tumultuous periodin which these traditions developed and the contentious struggles oftheir adherents for varying positions of social status and privilege.Mengzi, for example, seeking to defend key ideas in Confucian thought,goes beyond his forebears in advancing views on the goodness of humannature by appealing to more sharply formulated premises about innatedispositions for feeling and moral judgment against those assertingthat human nature is inherently neutral (2A6, and see Shun 1997 for anextensive analysis of argumentation in theMencius text). Bythe time Xunzi enters the fray near the end of the Warring Statesperiod we find rebuttals to Mencian thought that dig deep into what itis to have a disposition, how dispositions inform the possibilities ofhuman behavior, and how we ought to act in response to them (e.g.,Xunzi, Book 23). Far from simply explaining his views, Xunzimarshals highly intelligible theories of semantics and reference intheir defense, and he explicates these theories with punctiliousdefinitions that are marked improvements over earlier formulations.According to Cua 1985, methods of disputation reach their highestpoint in the writings of Xunzi, who in no small way benefited from thestandards of rigor that had emerged out of the ongoing disputes of hispredecessors.

These developments notwithstanding, it is still important to recognizethat the demise of Mohism following the Warring States period appearsto have squelched philosophical interest in the study of language andlogic mostly until modern times, when it was revived in 1894 thewritings of Sun Yirang (Graham 2003 [1978]: 70–2). Matters arecomplicated by the fact that logic as a unique object of study ordiscipline disentangled from other philosophical pursuits washistorically awakened in Chinese philosophical thought only after theintroduction of Western philosophical notions and methods in the16^th and 17^th centuries. The Jesuit scholarMatteo Ricci, who first arrived in China in 1583, brought more thanWestern science and literature; he introduced Euclid’sElements to the Chinese and arranged a translation of it withthe assistance of the Chinese scholar Xu Guangqi. For these reasons,considerable caution has to be exercised in any attempt to reconstructthe philosophical views of classical Chinese philosophers aboutlanguage and logic, to avoid anachronistically imposing notions thatwere not part of their original philosophical programs (Garrett 1993).Debates surrounding these issues are very much alive today, withcontemporary scholars of Chinese philosophy tending to fall on one orthe other side of the general dispute about whether it is appropriateto utilize concepts, terms, distinctions, modes of expression, ormethods of analysis that may have been of foreign origin to interpretthe works of classical Chinese philosophers (see the entrycomparative philosophy: Chinese and Western for further discussion).

It is indisputable that early Chinese philosophers of all majorschools of thought were, at various points in their philosophicaldevelopment, preoccupied to lesser and greater degrees with issuescentral to the philosophical studies of language and logic. However,whether they pursued these issues in ways that were similar to, orvery different from, Western or other foreign orientations is a matteron which no general consensus has been reached. Common notions in thephilosophical study of language include, for example, meaning, truth,reference, assertion, speech act, and propositional structure, notionsthat may or may not translate successfully into the vocabularyemployed by early Chinese philosophers, given radical linguistic andcultural differences.

Likewise, logic, construed as the study of inference, may have to beconceived differently from traditional Western accounts, given earlyChinese philosophers’ rather unique approach to reasoning aboutlanguage as a normative guide to ethical judgment and action (forexample, as based on the doctrine of the ordering of names). It is notat all clear that early Chinese philosophers had a conception of logicthat involved the typical notions of truth, validity, entailment,consistency, and so forth. Normally, an inference is conceived as arule-bound transition of some kind from one sentence-likestructure—a proposition, statement, or sentence—toanother, and is considered valid if it preserves truth. However, thereis some dispute about whether early Chinese philosophers werepreoccupied with truth as a semantic concept, and even whether theyconsidered sentences to be units of linguistic significance. On theother hand, contemporary developments of logic have opened up newvistas in the study of ancient ideas. Our primary concern in logicneed not be the preservation of truth, and different conceptions havebeen developed in which various conditions of satisfiability areemployed, with “validity” appropriately redefined. Caveatssuch as these admonish us to be open to alternative accounts of logicwhen interpreting the views of early Chinese philosophers, and toexercise caution when representing these views in contemporarynomenclature.

Needless to say, any solution to this debate will have to remain opennot only to research in the history of Chinese philosophy but also toadvances in the general studies of language, logic, cognition andhuman nature. Given the universality of language and logic as humancapacities or objects of use, can we assume that philosophersinterested in these topics will invariably identify, uncover, orutilize analogous concepts, presuppositions, or methods, regardless oftime, place, culture, or historical context, or that with conceptualadvances in their understanding of these topics, their views willinvariably converge? Answers to these questions will inform themethodologies involved in contemporary research on classical Chinesethought, by compelling us to interpret the writings of early Chinesephilosophers from perspectives motivated by assumptions about eithershared or divergent presuppositions, as the case may be.

2. Confucius and the Ordering of Names

The Mohists are generally credited with the first systematic study oflanguage in ancient China, but the inspiration for putting language atthe center of philosophical thought certainly comes from Confucius(551?–479? BCE). Against prevailing skepticism and apathy,Confucius insisted that the correct use of language is essential tothe order and harmony of society, and that the conditions by whichlanguage is correctly used devolve upon determining how names(ming) designate objects, events, and actions. However, thecorrect use of names is not simply a matter of attaching labels to apreexisting domain of things independent of human affairs. That is, itis commonly recognized that Confucius viewed language as having notsimply a descriptive function, but a fundamentally performative one aswell. Attributing names to objects is not a matter of describing theworld, but of influencing it in a way that causes certain modes ofinteraction and existence to be realized. One can do this poorly,contributing to the degradation of social relationships andone’s relationship with nature, or skillfully, in a way thatcontributes to social harmony and prosperity. The skillful use oflanguage depends on the extent to which one’s use of it reflectsa conscientious awareness of the meanings and values that areessential to acting effectively. This goes hand-in-hand with therealization that acting on behalf of these meanings and values isitself constitutive of the very relational efficacy one seeks toestablish.

In understanding this performative aspect of language one canappreciate why Confucius held that the ordering of society must beginwith the ordering of names. A famous exchange in theAnalectsexplains:

Scholars have often translated Confucius’ expressionchengming as “rectification of names”, but thistranslation has been widely supplanted with “ordering ofnames” to more explicitly reflect the continuously dynamic andcreative aspects of language use. Hall and Ames favor this lattertranslation, objecting to the former’s suggestion that thecorrect use of names is a matter of conforming to preexistingconventions of proper use, “rectifying” one’sbehavior in light of these conventions. The moral dilemmas we face arecontext-dependent and continuously undergoing transformation, soeffective moral action must be motivated by an awareness of thesecontexts and assume different courses where appropriate. Accordingly,while the Confucian ideal of moral conduct involves an unflaggingrespect for cultural institutions and the rituals embodied in them, italso requires “selectivity and creative synthesis”, andthe recognition that “inherited wisdom and institutions must beconstantly revamped to accommodate the shifting circumstances of analways unique world” (Hall and Ames 1987: 271–2).

Although this doctrine brought language to the forefront ofphilosophical inquiry, systematicdebate on its function andproper use did not begin until the Mohists gained prominence asConfucianism’s chief adversary. Departing from Confucianorthodoxy, the Mohists endeavored to justify their ethical viewsindependently of established customs on the basis of generalprinciples, the articulation of which demanded a comprehensive theoryof naming and reference.

3. Mohist Views on Logic and Language

The Later Mohist writings in which logic and language are provided themost extensive treatment are the entire four chapters of Book 10 andthe first two chapters of Book 11 of theMo Zi (chapters40–5, collectively referred to as the MohistCanons).The chapters of Book 10 are known by the titlesJing Shang(Canons I),Jing Xia (Canons II),JingShuo Shang (Expositions of the Canons I), andJingShuo Xia (Expositions of the Canons II). In Book 11, wehave theDa Qu (Greater Selection) and theXiaoQu (Lesser Selection). The text of theCanonsleaves a great deal unsaid; there are missing segments and obvioustextual errors, and interpretations of a number of critical passageshave exhibited widespread disagreement. For convenience, this entryfollows the widely recognized numbering system presented in Graham2003 [1978], which pairs eachCanon with its correspondingExposition and identifies the passages from each pair bynumbers prefixed with the letters A and B. (For instance, passage B40of theCanons is fromCanons II.) Graham’swork also reconstructs theDa Qu and theXiao Quinto a single corpus entitledNames and Objects (NO)(Graham 2003 [1978]), although there is controversy in hisreconstruction of theDa Qu as a single body of writing,given the fragmentary state of many of its key sections.

3.1 Basic Logical Notions

A great deal of scholarship on Mohist logic in the past 50 years hasbeen devoted to explicating Mohist texts with the purpose ofidentifying basic similarities with Western logical notions orprinciples (e.g., Zong 2000), or arguing that among the Mohists’basic aims was a program for developing a formal theoretical apparatuscomparable to, say, Aristotle’s categorical logic or theelementary propositional logic of the Stoics (e.g, Zhang and Liu2007). Alternatively, it has been claimed that embodied in theMohists’ account of disputation (bian) was in fact atheory of logical analysis motivated by a desire to deduce particular,informative statements about the world from general propositions(Harbsmeier 1998). According to Harbsmeier, “The aim of logicalanalysis was to establish a correct description of theworld”.

In spite of textual errors and incompleteness, there is no dearth ofmaterial in Mohist texts that is highly suggestive of thesesimilarities. In developing their views on disputation from itslogical roots, the Mohists appear to have made conscientious andregular use of logical operators that are commonly found intoday’s propositional calculi, including conjunction(yu), disjunction (ruo), a variety of articles andverbs for negation (e.g.,wu,fei,bu), andimplication (variously indicated withze,ran hou,and other devices). They gave special attention to quantificationalnotions, taking “no” or “none” (mo)as a primitive (or undefined) notion and in A43 defining“all” (jin) in terms of it: “All is nonenot being so” or, in modern notation, \(\forall x\varphi\=_{\mathit{df}}\ \mathrm{N}x\mathord{\sim}\varphi\). Furthermore, intheirGreater Selection (Da Qu), they use“all” to define “some”: “Some is notall” (NO5), quite possibly with the definition\(\exists x\varphi\ =_{\mathit{df}}\ \mathord{\sim}\forallx\mathord{\sim}\varphi \) in mind (although textual incompletenesswarrants caution on this point; Robins 2010 translates it as“Some is not exhaustive”). They employed special terms formodality, usingbi (necessity), for example, as an adverbialrelation between two things, where one can be said to be the necessarycomplement of another (e.g., elder brother and younger brother). Andsome scholars have suggested that the Mohists took steps towardformalizing their logical views by conscientiously employing variablesand other devices that are capable of functioning in the samegrammatical role, such as indefinite and demonstrative pronouns (e.g.,Liu and Zhang 2010). These views are plausible, but support for themis hampered by the fact that the texts do not present them in anorganized fashion, but mention them variously in passing as otherviews more central to their theoretical program are developed.

3.2 Principles of Reason and Inference

Beyond these superficial similarities with the basic logical notionsof contemporary formal-theoretical systems, there is a great deal ofmaterial in the MohistCanons that is indisputably concernedwith articulating logical principles, but whose interpretation isstill highly debatable. Scholars have extrapolated from Mohists textsversions of principles common to Western systems of symbolic logic,such as basic rules of inference (modus ponens,modustollens, hypothetical syllogism), necessary and sufficientconditions, the laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle, andreductio ad absurdum. Intriguingly, we also find what appearsto be a formulation of the liar paradox, first attributed in the Westto Eubulides in the 4^th century BCE: “To claim thatall saying contradicts itself is self-contradictory. Explained by:what he says himself” (B71). It is hard to believe that theMohists had anything in mind here but a precise notion of logicalinconsistency.

Observations such as these might encourage the view that the laterMohists were uncovering basic principles of reasoning that we allshare, regardless of culture or history. For instance, using theirstock examples of “ox” and “non-ox” forcontrary terms, the Mohists assert of any general kind that

[o]ne calling it “ox” and the other “non-ox”is “contending over claims which are the converse of eachother”,

and that

[s]uch being the case, they do not both fit the fact. (A74)

If these statements are really about converseclaims, asGraham’s translation contends (e.g., “This is anox”, and “This is a non-ox”), then the Mohistsappear be to asserting something quite like a version of the principleof non-contradiction formulated in Aristotle’sMetaphysics, in which it is stated of any two contradictorypropositions that they cannot both be true simultaneously (IV 61011b13–20, Kirwan 1993). Moreover, B35 appears to recognizethat they cannot both be false (“To say that there is no winnerin disputation necessarily does not fit the fact”), suggesting aversion of the principle of excluded middle.

Still, it is hasty to assume any resemblance here amounts to anequivalence. Aristotle’s principles are grounded in a theory ofpredication that is anything but neutral with respect to the basicstructure of a proposition. A categorical proposition has asubject-predicate structure that partly determines whether or not itis true, and this structure contributes to the explanation of theassertoric force of this proposition when asserted. There is no clearevidence that the Mohists were making a point here about truth, iftruth is conceived as a semantic property of propositions that have asubject-predicate structure. Indeed, some scholars have rejected theidea that a subject-predicate structure is a necessary condition ofsentences of even contemporary Chinese, let alone is classical forbear(e.g., Han 2009). Tiles and Yuan (2004) argue that thesubject-predicate structure of Aristotle’s categoricalpropositions only makes sense against the backdrop of a classificatorysystem in which things are categorized in terms of genera and species,something absent in early Chinese philosophers’ emphasis oncontext-dependent relationships among things in varying fields offocus. That is, to assert “This is an ox” is not toidentify a substance in terms of a species of things to which itbelongs, but to make an association between one thing and other thingswith the same name according to a presupposed criterion or standard,which varies depending on the context in which the association ismade. More fundamentally, A.C. Graham claims that the proposition wasa philosophical discovery only of the later Mohists, with theirearlier counterparts primarily interested in teasing out thephilosophical implications of individual terms and their combinationsin expressions (2003 [1978]). But in his view this discovery did notlead to an analysis of subject-predicate structure. Chad Hansen (1983)even rejects the view that early Chinese philosophers were concernedwith articulating theories of truth, suggesting instead that theirprimary focus was on the pragmatic, behavior-guiding functions oflanguage, and how these functions contribute to normative views aboutproper ethical discourse and conduct.

These important questions aside, it is clear that the Mohists had aprimary interest in determining the conditions under which two or moreobjects may be regarded as the same (tong) or different(yi). Correlatively, they looked for conditions in which anobject is admissibly characterized as of a certain kind. This promptedthe Mohists to recognize names of different types, three inparticular: unrestricted (da), classifying (lei),and private (si). In A78 the Mohists assert that“naming something ‘horse’ is classifying it”,and that “for ‘what is like the object’ wenecessarily use this name”, indicating that the name‘horse’ applies to a class of objects that are in somesense relevantly similar. By contrast, “naming someone‘Zang’” (or, say, the proper name‘Jack’) “is ‘private’”, a“name which stays confined to this object”. Names that are“private” refer to single individuals and no others. Thesetwo kinds of names are distinguished from the universal‘thing’, of which the Mohists assert, “any objectnecessarily (bi) requires this name”.

With this, the Mohist art of disputation concentrates on pairs ofcomplementary names (e.g., “ox” and “non-ox”)to determine which is admissibly applied to an object. Together, thetwo names in each pair partition all that exists into two mutuallyexclusive categories. Any given object is in one or the other categoryof each pair, but not both. Accordingly, the names of each pair cannotboth “fit” the object, nor can it be the case that neitherfits. It is in these terms that the Mohists recognized what we wouldidentify as the principles of non-contradiction and excluded middle.Their primary interest is with naming and reference, and onlyconsequentially are they drawn into reflections on meaning. In an actof reference, one’s utterance of “This is an ox”might be explained as the expression of a proposition in a speech actwith assertoric force. But this explanation depends on a generaltheory about the relation between reference and meaning, something theMohists did not explicitly investigate. Their increasing interest inhow names combine into meaningful wholes may have put them on theverge of developing such a theory, but their focus remained mostly atthe level of particular acts of naming and uses of words. This makesit an open question whether or to what extent the logical principlesunderwriting their specific views on reference, and their generaltheory of language, are adequately characterized in Aristotelian termsor in some other way.

Inference is commonly understood as a syntactic operation on the formof a sentence or assertion that preserves the semantic property oftruth. Aristotle’s logic, in which validity is determined by anargument’s categorical form independently of the truth of itspremises and the semantics of its terms, is an example. Like mostother early Chinese philosophers, the Mohists do not appear to haveconceived of valid inference in this way. Even as they gave increasingattention to matters of logical or grammatical form, they remainedskeptical that different categories of form can be regarded as aninvariable guide to meaning. In particular, they were consistentlywary of assuming that the meaning of a sentence or complex isdetermined by the meanings of its constituent parts and their modes ofcombination. For this reason they maintained that valid inference ispartly a semantic affair, hinging on our consideration of theidiosyncrasies of meanings in combination. So rather than developing atheory of inference strictly on the basis of appeals to logical orlinguistic form, they instead sought to develop a viableclassification of what they took to be valid inference patterns basedon analogies in the semantics of terms in combination (seesection 3.4 below).

This prioritizing of semantics over formal logic had the effect ofencouraging a rather different conception of argumentation basedmainly on patterns of analogical reasoning, which the Mohists referredto asbian. Fraser 2013 argues thatbian isunderstood in classical Chinese texts with an assortment of meaningsof different levels of generality. Broadly speaking, it refers toprocesses of reasoning and disputation, basic operations of cognition,and the means by which we acquire knowledge. But in its more specificuse it involves correlating things based on their similarities anddifferences, and drawing conclusions from the distinctions thusestablished. Given that objects are found to resemble one another indifferent ways, we correlate them consistently only in virtue of amodel or standard (fa), which the Mohists define in A70 oftheCanons as “that in being like which something isso”. By ascertaining the resemblance relation between otherobjects and the standard, we apply the name consistently and identifya class. Thus, to answer the question of whether or not we shouldpredicate of somethingx the nameG, the Mohistswould typically identify a modelm (a particular object) forG, and then inquire whetherx resembles the model.If it does, then they would assert “x isG” as a consequence.

The Mohist conception of valid inference may depart from many Westernaccounts in another way as well. Given their prevailing tendency toregard the action guiding significance of language as its principalfunction, the Mohists were likely compelled to think of the semanticproperty that is preserved in valid inference not simply indescriptive terms, but in normative ones as well. It is for thisreason that scholars of early Chinese philosophy often prefer totranslate the Chinese evaluative termke as“admissibility”, as opposed to “truth”, sincethe Mohist conception of the correct use of a sentence was closelytied to presuppositions about proper social conduct. In this way,valid inference was construed as having complex justificatory import.For instance, in claiming that an actionx is humane(ren) by its resemblance with the conduct of a sage, one isalso providing justification for it as such, because one is assertingin the act of naming that it resembles the model for humane action,and resembling this model is the very condition that justifies callingit such. (Recall again that naming something is classifying it, suchthat for anything else that is like it one is obligated to use thesame name.) Moreover, asserting thatx is humane justifiesthe claim that itought to be recognized as such, because themodel which it resembles (in being amodel) is the veryjustification for how the name ought to be used. Its resemblancecarries with it the normative requirement that language usersrecognize it as such, for that is what would be expected of a languagewhose principal function is to guide behavior and encourage propersocial conduct. Arguably, the English terms “admissible”and “inadmissible” come closer to capturing this notionthan the more neutral terms “truth” and“falsehood”.

3.3 Methods of Application and Problems

Given this appeal to resemblance for valid inference, we can perhapssee why the Mohists’ semantical investigations took priorityover the analysis of logical form. Determining whetherx isG depends on whether it resembles the modelm, butobjects can resemble one another in different ways, and imperfectly.To use one of the Mohists’ own examples, a man may resemble thechosen standard of a “black man” because he has blackhair, but we would not for that reason call him a black man. He wouldhave to resemble the standard “in the appropriate way”(yi), as determined by a criterion (yin)(A95–7). Similarly, a square piece of wood resembles acarpenter’s T-square (taken as a model) in virtue of itssquareness, not its being wood (B65). A horse is big not because itseyes are big, but because its body is, whereas it is blind because ofits eyes, not its body (Xiao Qu [NO18]). The Mohistsgenerally identify these criteria by appeal to discriminationsdirectly evident in perception or based on ideas parasitic on acts ofperception (such as the mental image of a square). Butbianis more than just a term for the discriminatory acts of perception; itis about the business of naming objects in virtue of appropriatediscriminations, and the application of a name cannot be regarded ascorrect without an appeal to its semantic content. This is lessevident with simple terms like “horse” or“square”, whose practical applications are plain enough topreclude any conscious reflection on meanings. But it was surely atthe forefront of the Mohists’ minds in their consideration ofterms with abstract content and complex expressions, like“beneficence”, “utility”, and “universallove”.

For instance, a consequence of the Mohists’ doctrine ofuniversal love is that “loving people” (ai ren)requires loving all people without exception, a criterion that isquantificationally different from that of “riding horses”(cheng ma), which requires only that a person ride at leastone horse (Xiao Qu [NO17]). These expressions aresimilar grammatically, but the Mohists analyzed their quantificationalcontent differently, something not given merely in the analysis ofperception. So the Mohists’ research program was one ofcoordinating similarities and differences given in perception withdivisions determined in the analyses of the semantics of terms. Theresult is the determination of criteria that fix the relations betweenobjects and their chosen models (cf. A97). To be sure, questionsabound in attempting to suitably refine these criteria to apply themconsistently (the perceptual content of the world may be infinitelycomplex), but this is precisely what gave the Mohists’philosophical research program its impetus. (For a fascinating essayon issues arising out of attempts at modeling in modern nomenclatureMohist conceptions of reasoning aboutyi, see Liu, Seligman,and van Benthem 2011.) For the Mohists, such practical concerns withthe relations between names and objects superseded investigations intological form.

On the other hand, while the analysis of logical form might not havebeen the Mohists’ primary theoretical concern, we should nottake this to imply that their philosophical pursuits did not involveample deductive reasoning. Lucas 2020 provides several examples ofargumentative passages from Mohist texts that appear “almost readymade” for formalization and which are easily regimented in a way thatdemonstrates either their deductive validity or inductive soundness.Indeed, the Mohists seem to have presupposed as aparadigm ofgood reasoning a form of inference that is purely deductive. Note thatthe Mohists assert “x isG” as aconsequence ofx’s resemblance with the modelm forG, but this only follows logically with theaddition of a further general principle, something like“Anythingx that resembles the modelm forG isG”. This principle might not have beenrendered explicit in their logical investigations, but their assertionthatx isG does not follow without itspresupposition or something logically equivalent to it, and they didmake a distinguished place for quantifiers among their basic logicalnotions. So assuming that the model forG ism, theMohists appear to have taken the following (or something equivalent toit) as a paradigmatic form of reasoning formally justifying theapplication of names to objects:

This argument is deductively valid, and it seems highly improbablethat the Mohists were not employing something like it in theirassertions about the correct methodology for resolving disputes bybian. So, it would be highly misleading to say that theMohists were simply not doing logic of the kind with which we arefamiliar today. That they were not formalizing a theory of logicalform does not imply that they were not engaged in rigorously defendingtheir views on the basis of principles that involve or presupposevalid deductive reasoning and other basic methods of logic. To besure, that the Mohists did not articulate this pattern of reasonexplicitly could support the claim that their use of it was littlemore than a trivial exercise of our unconscious aptitude for deductivereason, and hence unwarranted as a distinctive feature of theirphilosophy. Even if this is true, however, its consistency with thetext makes it not unlikely that they were on the verge of discoveringit, for they did endeavor to provide analyses of linguistic form,which point in the direction of formalization, and with the apparentintention of testing theories about various patterns of inference (seesection 3.4 below).

Going with this idea, it has been suggested that the Mohists didrealize a distinction between predicates and singular terms in theirclassification of names: recall that in A78lei refers tonames that classify (they may be true or admissible of many things,like predicates), whereassi refers to names that are fixedto individual objects (like singular terms). When we add the Mohists’third category, unrestricted (da), we have a set of namesthat Lucas (2020) identifies as corresponding to the three basicsyntactic categories that are common to the notations of formal logic:individual variables (whose values may be unrestricted), predicates(whose values are determined extensionally by classes), and individualconstants (or singular terms, whose values are fixed to individualobjects). This gives us some liberty, at least, for thinking of simpleMohist statements in terms of the basic form of predication“\(F(a)\)”, and even for allowing for the use ofquantifiers and variables, \(\forall x(\textit{F}x)\)and \(\existsx(\textit{F}x)\).

It was noted above that for the Mohists our capacity to correlateobjects in various ways is exercised when we name particular objectsand then apply these names to all objects that are analogous to them.We correlate objects consistently in virtue of a modelfa(“that in being like which something is so”) (A70), and weidentify a class from this model by ascertaining the resemblancerelation between it and other objects. Indeed, according to Graham, byidentifying an object as a “horse” based on itsresemblance with the standard for horses, we are in effect treatingthe namema (“horse”)

as an abbreviation of “something which is like theobject”, the object being the particular for which the name isordained. (2003 [1978]: 325)

Hence, on this interpretation, when the Mohists sayyou ma(“There is a horse”), or \(\exists x(\textit{Horse}(x))\),they are, in effect, making an assertion that the particular object towhich they are referring is such that it correctly resembles the modelfor horses. (The termyou would have been taken to implyexistence.) That is to say,

(P1)

There is an objectx such thatx resembles themodelm for horses.

We can extend this idea to assertions of Classical Chinese of the form‘F G ye’, which we gloss here as “AllF areG”, or “F areG” (withF functioning as a genericquantifier). For example, taking the expressionbai ma(“white horse”) to represent “anyx thatresembles the model \(m_1\) for white horse” andma(“horse”) for “anyx that resembles themodel \(m_2\) for horse”, the basic form of the assertion“White horses are horses” would be:

(P2)

Anyx that resembles the model \(m_1\) for white horseresembles the model \(m_2\) for horse.

This seems to captures the Mohists’ view for basic nominalassertions, but there are problems with it, however. Resemblance isnormally construed as a relation that is both reflexive and symmetric.Notice that the model \(m_1\) for white horse resembles itself, if\(\forall x(\textit{Resembles}(x,x))\) is assumed. In virtue of P2,the model \(m_1\) resembles the model \(m_2\). Since the color whiteis irrelevant to the criterion required for the resemblance to\(m_2\), it must be in virtue of its shape that \(m_1\) resembles\(m_2\). (Shape is a common example the Mohists use to distinguishhorses when color is irrelevant.) But then, given symmetry,

\(m_2\) resembles \(m_1\), by the same criterion. This would warrantthe conclusion that any model \(m_i\) that satisfies the requisitecriterion of shape for “horse” would warrant the name“white horse”, regardless of its color. Hence, a modelthat is brown would warrant the name “white horse”.

These are undesirable consequences of this view, but they do follow onstandard analyses of resemblance. Did the Mohists really intend itthis way? More careful exegesis suggests probably not, but scholarshipon Mohist thought has tended to gloss over semantic subtleties infailing to recognize that in Classical Chinese the term forresemblance (tong) is highly polysemous, with differentmeanings that the Mohists endeavored to distinguish (Fung 2020b). InA86–7 of theCanons the Mohists articulate fourdistinct senses of sameness or resemblance (tong), along withdifference (yi), corresponding roughly to the notions ofbeing identical, being the units of a whole or class, constituting thesame object, and being of the same kind:

Sameness: Identical, as units, as together, as of a kind.

Note the inclusion of identity; the Mohists usetongvariously much in the way the copula “is” functions inEnglish. What is obvious from the explanations they provide of theseterms is that, however much their stock illustrations appeal to actsof perception, the Mohists are using their technical termtong much more broadly than mere perceptual likeness. Theyinclude identity, as noted, as when two names refer to the same thingor have the same extension (gou “dog” andquan “canine” were typical examples). Moreover,not only may two horses appear alike perceptually (being of the sameshape or having four legs), but a hand may be “the sameas” Mozi (being a part of Mozi) or the same as another part ofMozi, the hardness and whiteness of a stone may be the same in partlyconstituting the same object (“as together”), and Mozi maybe “the same as” a human (in that he is “of thekind” human). These examples make it evident, moreover, thattong was intended to cover both mereological and member-setrelations (cf. Fraser 2007). Such relations are obviously not alwayssymmetrical, and while there is no direct evidence that the Mohistswere perplexed by the specific problem posed above, it is evident thattheir own definitions provided them with various means ofresponse.

For purposes here, one way to do this is to adopt the generic notionof an admissible substitute, taking care to provide criteria ofadmissibility that is inclusive enough to capture the points in theanalysis above. For instance, any white horse can stand as anadmissible substitute for the model for “horse”, but it isnot true that any horse can serve as an admissible substitute for“white horse”.

(P3)

Anyx that is an admissible substitute for the model\(m_1\) forF is an admissible substitute for the model\(m_2\) forG.

Why do some things count as admissible substitution instances but notothers? More specifically, what is it in virtue of a thing that makesit “resemble” something else? The Mohists do give manyillustrations of relevant criteria, making it evident that there aredifferent kinds; shape, color, and function are common examples. Asnoted above, we judge the squareness of a piece of wood by thesimilarity of its shape with a carpenter’s T-square, and saythat a horse is white because of its color, not its shape. We alsojudge that a horse is blind because its eyes are impaired in theirfunction.

Indeed, given that the Mohists did not claim to provide an exhaustivelist of these criteria, and that the text refers to them mainly by wayof example (T-squares, blind horses), the door is open to the viewthat virtually anything can stand as a criterion of resemblance andmay even be regarded as “appropriate” depending on thecontext of reference.

Mou (2016) argues that the Mohists identified these criteria throughfeatures of salience in variable fields of cognitive focus: an aspectof a thing can stand as a criterion of resemblance provided only thatwe, as language users, single it out either through an act ofperception or through a mental act in which one’s attention isconcentrated inward (such as on a mental image). Furthermore, thisaspect may be used appropriately in that the judgments we make may betrue or false depending on whether it is singled out in such anattentive act. For example, the judgment “A white horse is not ahorse” may be deemed false if the salient aspect of our mentalfocus is on the “horse-ness” feature of each entityindicated (white horse and horse). But it may also be deemed true ifthe salient aspect is “whiteness”, since whiteness is afeature that may be true of some horses but not others.

Mou’s account situates this view in the context of an account ofreference that requires two joint determinants in every referentialact: (1) an undifferentiated semantic-whole that is referred toindependently of any particular aspect or feature, and (2) aparticular aspect or feature that is rendered salient by our facultiesof attention. Mou argues that this dual-reference account provided theMohists with the flexibility to determine the truth or falsehood ofjudgements variously by situating each determination in a context thatarises out of the many – perhaps infinite – ways in whichwe can identify things. At the same time, this account was alsointended to provide an objective ground for the determination of thetruth of our judgments by requiring that reference (and correlativelyour knowledge of the identities of objects) be determined in each actby a mind-independent whole from which any particular aspect isidentified.

Whether or not the Mohists held anything like this dual-referenceaccount, it is clear that which criteria the Mohists found relevantdepended on what they found “appropriate” in comparisonsof things, and the identification of these criteria was no doubt botha central part of the Mohists’ research program and a source ofongoing controversy in debates with their opponents. But given thesubtlety with which the Mohists analyzed their key terms, they seem tohave been increasingly sensitive to the worry that no exhaustive listis possible.

Moreover, they were aware that simple terms might have complex orpolysemous meanings, and that the problems of analysis are compoundedas terms are combined into larger expressions. As a result, it becameincreasingly evident that complex expressions of the same grammaticalform can have different conditions of satisfaction. An example fromtheLesser Selection (Xiao Qu) noted above comesfrom their analysis of the expressions “loving people”(ai ren) and “riding horses” (chengma):

Loving people requires loving all people without exception, only thenis this called loving people. Not loving people does not requireloving no people at all; it is (rather) not loving all people withoutexception, and by this it is called not loving people. Riding horsesdoes not require riding all horses without exception; it is (rather)riding some horses, and by this it is called riding horses. But notriding horses does require riding no horses at all; only by this is itcalled not riding horses. These are cases in which something applieswithout exception in one case but not in the other. (Xiao Qu;tr. Graham 2003 [1978])

The Mohists are pointing out here that the predicate “lovespeople” is satisfied only by those who happen to love allpeople, whereas the predicate “rides horses” is satisfiedby anyone who happens to ride at least one horse. By the same token,the predicate “does not love people” is satisfied byanyone who fails to love at least one person, whereas the predicate“does not ride horses” requires that one ride no horses atall. To take another example, the Mohists observe that the name for“both” (ju) works differently in combination withdifferent names; we say “They both fight” (judou), but not “They both are two” (ju er).Again, while the namefu means “husband” on itsown, its combination withyong yields the sense “braveman” (yong fu) without any reference to a husband,indicating that complex meanings are not necessarily mere products oftheir constituent parts (B3). Revelations such as these prompted whatis aptly characterized as a linguistic turn in Mohist philosophy, asthe Mohists concentrated their attention on language itself and theimplications its grammatical forms have on the analysis ofmeaning.

3.4 The Mohist Linguistic Turn

The Mohist program was beset with two basic kinds of problems. First,in the domain of reference, the Mohists encountered difficulties intheir method of “extending kinds”. This was the problem ofidentifying appropriate salience conditions in perception and thoughtto serve as criteria for naming the similar similarly and thedifferent differently. Second, in the domain of meaning, they facedunexpected questions in their evaluations of the meanings of names incomplex expressions, suggesting problems in extending their theory ofreference from simple terms to complex expressions on the assumptionthat the latter are to be treated compositionally. One can see how theMohists’ preference for reasoning by analogy, and the problemsbeleaguering their quest for certainty, would have encouraged them toadopt the same orientation with respect to the study of languageitself, its grammatical forms and their implications for meaning. Theyturned their attention to the study of language in hopes that moresophisticated analyses of meaning would help resolve some of theproblems afflicting their account of reference. But one would alsoexpect the Mohists to remain apprehensive here about making generalstatements, just as they found was necessary in their analysis ofreference, and this is exactly what we find in the later writings oftheCanons, particularly in theLesser Selection(Xiao Qu), the compilation most noteworthy for its novelinsights in the study of language.

On the surface, the Mohist program for language is to put together aninventory of parallel linguistic constructions with the expectationthat the logic implicated in their meanings will at least partly tracktheir grammatical form. But the Mohists’ recognition thatjudgments about resemblance involve uncertainty convinced them thatany method of disputation based on analogies in grammatical form isnot inherently reliable. They explain:

Things have respects in which they are similar, yet it doesn’tfollow that they are completely similar. Parallels between expressionsare correct only up to a point. When things are “so”,there is that by which they are “so”. Their being“so” is the same, but that by which they are“so” isn’t necessarily the same. When people acceptthings, there is that by which they accept them. Their accepting themis the same, but that by which they accept them isn’tnecessarily the same. Hence, expressions in analogies, parallelizing,“pulling”, and “pushing” become different asthey proceed, become dangerous as they change direction, fail whentaken too far, and separate from their root as they flow, and so onecannot be careless and cannot invariably use them. Thus statementshave many methods, separate kinds of different reasons, and so onecannot look at only one side. (Lesser Selection [XiaoQu])

The Mohists are crisscrossing here between reference and meaning,between the problems they observe in their analogical theory of namingand those they now identify in their theory of linguistic parallels.Presumably, the Mohist expression “being so”(ran) is a reference to “being of a certainkind”, and “that which makes it so” refers to theconditions under which a thing is admissibly considered to be of thatkind. Recall the Mohist observation that objects may resemble oneanother but not be of the same kind, because they do not resemble oneanother “in the appropriate way”. Here the Mohists appearto be making the correlative point that two objects may be of the samekind (“their being ‘so’ is the same”), whilethe conditions that warrant their being treated as of the same kindare not necessarily the same. In the domain of meaning, the Mohistsare making the same point: expressions in language may have the samegrammatical form, but the conditions by which they are admissiblyapplied might be different.

The passage quoted above makes a passing reference to four techniquesof disputation commonly recognized by the Mohists and theirinterlocutors. The four techniques are listed explicitly in theLesser Selection with explanations:

There is a great deal of controversy surrounding how these techniquesare to be understood and what their relationship is. It has beenargued that they comprise the steps of a single, complex inferenceprocedure in which a claim is established. However, this view isdifficult to justify because it requires supporting the claim thateach step is somehow necessary, serving as an essential premise forthe next. An easier and more commonly accepted view is that eachtechnique may operate independently to establish a point. Yang (2020)argues that each serves to make an inference in its own right: thefirst two are used to infer in each case that a proposition is true,while the second two are used to infer in each case that a propositionis false. By contrast, Robins (2010) argues that each is an instanceof the general method of reasoning by analogy that was commonthroughout most of early Chinese thought. The Mohists are clarifyingfour different ways in which this general method might beinstantiated. The first two cover the domains of reference andmeaning, as distinguished above. Analogy (pi) indicates themethod of extending kinds, employing models of comparison inperception or thought by acts of reference to identify or explain whatsomething is. Parallelizing (mou) is the Mohist extension ofthis idea into the world of linguistic forms. “Pushing”and “pulling” hint at the pragmatic circumstances indisputation in which one attempts to establish a claim on the basis ofits analogy with claims the other side has already accepted.

Here we concentrate on the technique of parallelizing, arguably theMohists’ most original contribution to early Chinese thought ondisputation and logic. (For further discussion, see Yang 2020, Robins2010 and 2012, and the entryMohist Canons.) As their explanation suggests (“comparing expressions andjointly proceeding”,bi ci er ju xing), the Mohiststreat parallelizing as a technique in which linguistic models of acertain grammatical form are utilized to make a comparative pointabout some other linguistic construction that is in doubt. Forinstance, the following statements have similar grammatical form:

Each is a model that instantiates a common linguistic form. TheMohists do not give a symbolic representation of this form, but we canassume its recognition as a general kind in virtue of the parallelismin structure that the models collectively exhibit. Technically, eachstatement is a conjunction of two simpler statements (with no obviousconditional relationship indicated, which is sometimes assumed). Sothe general form seems to be:

(Form A)

(A isB) & (VA isVB),

whereV is a verb combined with the noun phrasesAandB to yield, in effect, two distinct nominalizedinfinitives. We call this “Form A” to represent a generalkind, a kind of linguistic form commonly recognized in its instances.On the other hand, they are aware that instances of this form may failas well. For example:

The Mohists put these latter examples in a different class, which wemay identify as:

(Form B)

(A isB) & (VA is notVB)

The Mohist technique of parallelizing seeks to establish some otherclaim that might be doubted on the basis of its analogy with theproposed models. Consider the following statement constructed from thenominals “boat” and “wood”, and the verb“enter”:

A boat is wood, [but] entering a boat is not entering wood.

The Mohists treat this statement as admissible, thus classifying itunder the general kind associated withForm B. This is “comparing expressions and jointly proceeding”,but the Mohists’ increasing sensitivity to semantic nuances ledthem to admonish caution about drawing inferences merely on the basisof form. Some inferences “proceed”, others don’t,regardless of obvious parallelisms. As a result, they appropriatedindividual cases in one way or another depending on how the semanticsof their terms played out in combination. On the other hand, thiscareful attention to individual cases led them to a discovery ofintensional contexts, arguably the most original contribution of theMohists’ studies of language.

3.5 Investigations of Intensionality

The later Mohists may well have been the first in the world to attemptto furnish a systematic philosophical treatment of intensionality. Anabundance of evidence suggests that they were aware of both thepervasiveness of intensional phenomena in natural language and the wayin which these phenomena tend to frustrate the view that naturallanguage meaning is essentially compositional in structure (Willman2010). They were probably also aware not only of the distinctionbetween intensions and extensions, but also of the way in which thisdistinction may be essential to the determination of the truth oradmissibility of sentences involving intensional contexts. Moreover,they do not seem to have made any attempt to explain away thesecontexts in terms of basic semantic principles, by denying that theyexist, or by asserting that they can be reduced to, or explained interms of, other more philosophically admissible modes of expression.On the contrary, they not only embraced intensionality as afundamental feature of language, but also attempted to exploit it forthe purpose of advancing their philosophical views, particularly theirviews on ethics.

To be sure, the Mohists did not attempt to develop any rigorousnotation for handling differences of logical form. But as noted inexamples above, they were wary of assuming that sentences orexpressions with the same grammatical form have analogous semanticalrepresentations. It is quite possibly from observations like thesethat the later Mohists were led to compare the satisfaction conditionsof expressions obtained from the intersubstitution of co-referentialterms and co-extensive predicates. They did so by utilizing what wewould now identify as tests for intensionality. Many of these testsinvolved typical epistemic verbs, like “know”,“think of”, and “love”. For instance, in B40of theCanons the Mohists claim that:

To assert the identity of knowing dogs and knowing canines is amistake; to not do so is not a mistake.

This translation is but one of many that have variously interpretedthe original text, and some scholars have claimed that the original isin need of textual emendation due to copyist errors in centuries past(e.g., He 1971 and Chen 1983; see also Zong 2000). However, it doesmake sense when we recognize that the Mohists spent a great deal ofeffort thinking about how the meanings of simple names vary incombination with others. According to A.C. Graham, the namesgou (dog) andquan (canine) were the Mohists’stock examples of terms that refer to the same thing, but which haveslightly different senses, probably due to their individualetymologies. Contemporary philosophers of language might consider thatthe Mohists were on the verge of developing an ontology of mentalstates with these examples, thinking of the opacity of the context“knowing” as a consequence of potential failures ofknowledge. Jack might know what a dog is, but he might not know what acanine is, regardless of the co-extension of “dog” and“canine”. But the Mohists were not likely thinking oflanguage in any way as a window to the mind. There is no indicationanywhere in Mohist literature suggesting that they were interested indeveloping a classification of mental states. Indeed, the Mohistsweighed the consequences of comparing linguistic expressions involvingnot only those intensional verbs we usually associate with mentalstates, such as “know”, “think of”,“believe”, “love” and the like, but alsoapparently intensional contexts introduced by verbs having nothingobviously to do with the mind, and they provide no indications thatthey thought about distinguishing them.

In theXiao Qu, for example, the Mohists give an intensionalanalysis of linguistic contexts involving the expressions“riding” (cheng), “entering”(ru), “abounding in” (duo), “beingwithout” (wu), “serve” (shi), andeven “killing” (sha). Their interest seems tohave been primarily semantical, with the issue of compositionality atthe forefront of their inquiries. They were concerned with whether ornot ideographs in combination produced meaningful wholes that areproperly analyzed as the sums of their constituent parts. Those notanalyzable in this way were likely deemed idiomatic. Consider againthe curious use of the phrase “entering wood” (rumu) in the following line fromNO15:

A boat is wood, but entering a boat is not entering wood.

The verb “entering” (ru) would not normally beconsidered to indicate an intensional context. Zhang and Liu (2007)analyze the complex expressionru mu (entering wood) as“going to die”, a meaning obviously surpassing theconnotation ofru chuan (entering a boat), in this casesignifying only the simple action of going into a boat. On the otherhand, each of these expressions is identical in grammatical form, afact again leading the Mohists to the conclusion that grammatical formcan be deceptive and that any expression may be either an analyzablecompound or an undifferentiable semantic whole.

It might be noted that the terms “boat” and“wood” are not co-extensive, and hence cannot beinterchanged to test whether or not the context in which they occur isintensional. Yet while it is true that the Mohists recognized names ofdifferent scope (lei categorizes names that classify manythings whilesi categorizes those that refer to just one),they were clearly not confined to conceiving expressions of the form“X isY” as assertions of predication.As noted above, their concept of “sameness”(tong) was inclusive enough to accommodate a reading that inno way presupposes a failure of extension. For instance, a boat iswood in the sense that it is made up of wood, where “wood”is conceived not as a general kind, but as the very stuff of which theboat in question is made. This is likely what the Mohists had in mindwith this example because the point they are making clearly turns on acomparison of the meanings of linguisticcomplexes(“entering a boat” and “entering wood”) andhow the meanings of words change in virtue of the contexts in whichthey occur.

Moreover, intensionality is marked by tests other than theintersubstitution of co-referential terms, co-extensive predicates, orlogically equivalent sentences. A context may be deemed intensional ifit contains a phrase with a quantifier that allows for an“unspecific” reading (see the entry onintensional transitive verbs). For example, it may be true that Oedipus is seeking a member of hisfamily, but not true that he is seeking Jocasta, in spite of the factthat Jocasta is a member of his family. For, there might be no familymemberin particular whom Oedipus is seeking. Something likethis seems to be the point the Mohists are making with the followingexample:

Her younger brother is a handsome man, but loving her younger brotheris not loving a handsome man.

The sparsity of grammatical marks for quantification in ClassicalChinese does not require us to read the expressionmei ren(“a handsome man”) in terms of the existentiallyquantified phrase “somex such thatx is maleand handsome”. But this only makes the Mohists’ point moreglaring. If “loving a handsome man” (ai mei ren)may be taken to involve romantic attraction, and not just the kind offilial love that exists between family members, then we can see whythe Mohists would consider this a failure of inference.

Similar points are made with regard to the remaining non-epistemicintensional transitive verbs. For example:

The father ofhuo is a human; and yet it does not follow fromthis that whenhuo serves his father, he is serving ahuman.

Evidence that the transitive verbshi (serve) is intensionalcomes from the expression “serving a human”, which wasunderstood in terms of the behavior of a service worker, somebody whoacts as a servant. Quite obviously this has nothing to do with statesof mind (such as those involving failures of knowledge).

On the other hand, we feel rightly confused when the Mohists say:

Robbers are people … but killing robbers is not killingpeople.

The term “killing” is ordinarily thought of as anextensional verb. It is a matter of some controversy, but the Mohistsapparently felt that the combination of the ideographssha(killing) anddao ren (robbers) formed an idiom that wasrecognized as a distinct, unanalyzable unit of common speech, carryingwith it connotations of justified execution. This was not discerned inthe semantics of “killing people”, which probably moresimply indicated an act of murder. Indeed, the Mohists explicitlyprohibited the latter in connection with their espoused doctrine ofuniversal love (cf.NO17 from Graham’s translation(2003 [1978])). Not unlike many Western philosophers, the Mohists seemto have felt that careful attention to semantical nuances can have animportant bearing on moral issues.

That is to say, part of the Mohists’ interest in the analysis oflanguage stems from a firm conviction that the semantical distinctionsuncovered by careful analysis can help put to rest certain questionsabout the legitimacy of their basic moral beliefs. The Mohistsinsisted that proper conduct involves “loving all people withoutexception” (which implies opposing acts of murder), but theywere also not opposed to the “justified execution” ofthose found guilty of serious crime. When questioned on grounds ofinconsistency, they replied by pointing out that the endorsement ofjustified execution is not an inhumane act that compromises theirstance on the value of loving all people. This might not haveconvinced many of their interlocutors that their doctrine of universallove is justified, but it would have put to rest the charge that theywere being illogical, and in any case consistency would surely havebeen conceived as a mark of superiority over any of the views of theiropponents incapable of withstanding comparable scrutiny.

4. Daoist Replies and Critique of Logic

While the kinds of semantic rules underlying the interpretation of ourexpressions in language might be heterogeneous, with no guarantee thatassumptions about compositionality will hold, the Mohists neverthelessdid not waver in their belief that the objects of experience exhibitreal similarities and differences, and that the identification ofthese similarities and differences is what allows us to“distinguish the noble and the base” (ming guijian, to use Xunzi’s phrase). Indeed, the central purposeof language is to guide behavior by clarifying how one should act, andthis is done by distinguishing the noble and the base through thesubtle analysis of similarities and differences. We take the actionsof exemplary individuals as models, identify the criteria thatdistinguish them or their actions, and act accordingly in an analogousway. Sometimes these semantic analyses would reveal odd consequences;as noted above, “robbers are people, but killing robbers is notkilling people”. But the Mohists were not in general averse toembracing such oddities, given their general conviction that thephilosophical explication of meaning should follow normal conventionsof use. In any case, they never abandoned the belief that anexhaustive analysis of semantic possibilities should rendertransparent real similarities and differences in the world in a waythat provides a consistent, invariable guide for action. If theanalysis of language can provide this, then confusion about how to actshould be dispelled from society and people should be able to livetogether in harmony.

This claim that the analysis of language can provide a consistentguide for action is precisely what the Daoists targeted in theirobjections and the main focus of their philosophical skepticism. Whatis surprising is that Daoist skeptics like Zhuangzi do not reject theMohists’ basic view that the world is populated by various kindsof objects with real similarities and differences. They agree,moreover, in their basic understanding of how objects undergodifferent forms of transformation in time; the Mohists even give usdistinct terms to convey these differences. The difference is that, inZhuangzi’s view, no matter how much analysis we undertake, orhow finely we discriminate, our language will never secure enoughtraction in reality to provide us with a constant guide for action.Zhuangzi was so unsatisfied with the ongoing debates of his times thathe was compelled to develop what he took to be a transcendentphilosophical worldview not limited by the hope of resolving thesedebates through simple explications of semantic distinctions. Life islarger than what can be grasped by the human capacity for reason, andthere are forms of intuitive knowledge or experience that cannot beexplained by the crude implements of language.

There are stories in theZhuangzi that attest to theperfected skills of wheelwrights, carpenters, and other artisans wholament the fact that they cannot express how they manage to performtheir tasks so well. The self-description of wheelwright Pian is agood example:

I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel awheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slidesand won’t take hold. But if they’re too hard, it bites inand won’t budge. Not too gentle, not too hard—you can getit in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can’t put it intowords, and yet there is a knack to it somehow. I can’t teach itto my son and he can’t learn it from me. So I’ve gonealong for seventy years and at my age I am still chiseling wheels.When the men of old died they took with them the things thatcouldn’t be handed down. So what you are reading there must benothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old. (tr. Watson 1968:152–3)

The reference to books at the end of this passage is striking.Zhuangzi claims to have an insight about the subtlety and facility ofunderstanding that cannot be captured in written form, or even throughoral discourse with appropriate demonstratives. The names of languagediscriminate meanings, but inevitably there is slippage in theircoordination with objects.

This is most obviously apparent in Zhuangzi’s appeal to theindexical phenomena of language, which Zhuangzi used as a foil againstthe Mohists’ claim that the meanings of terms can reliably fixtheir designations. He seems to have in mind what we would understandby the term “indexical” today: a term whose designation isfixed not only by its meaning but also by facts about the conditionssurrounding its utterance. Such facts are relevant to thedetermination of the shifting referents of pronouns (“I”,“you”), demonstratives (“this”,“that”), and spatial and temporal adverbs(“here”, “there”, “yesterday”,“now”, “before”), and Zhuangzi appeals to allof these in a variety of elliptical and argumentative contexts. Hisgeneral view seems to be that different perspectives or standpointsinvolved in the utterances of terms have important bearings on howthese terms are used and what they refer to. The so-called impureindexicals “this” (bi) and “that”(shi) (see the entry onindexicals), commonly used in Classical Chinese for naming objects (“This isa horse”, “That is an ox”), make the perspectivalismof Zhuangzi’s approach clear:

No thing is not that; no thing is not this. From that, it is not seen;from this it is known. Therefore it is said: That comes out of this;this goes along with that; which is to say, that and this are bornsimultaneously. (Zhuangzi 2/27–29; tr. Graham 1989)

Arguably, Zhuangzi is suggesting that reference is always keyed to aperspective that somehow rules out others. This would explain theconclusion that “that and this are born simultaneously”:the perspective one takes in calling an object “this”implies an alternative perspective in which another calls it“that”. “That” and “this” is apair whose terms function in coordination. Zhuangzi is seeking aphilosophical perspective that transcends all arbitrarydichotomies:

This too is that, that too is this. There they say “It’sthis, it’s not” from one point of view, here we say“It’s this, it’s not” from another point ofview. Are there really this and that? Or really no this and that?Where neither this nor that finds its opposite is called the axis ofthe Way. When once the axis is found at the center of the circle thereis no limit to responding with either, on the one hand no limit towhat is this, on the other no limit to what is not. Therefore I say,“The best means is illumination”. (Zhuangzi2/29–31; tr. Graham 1989)

This point is made with demonstratives, which are among the mostfickle of the indexicals of language, seemingly capable of referringto anything regardless of context. But we can appreciate thegeneralization Zhuangzi is hinting at when we consider again how theMohists explained acts of reference. Recall that when the Mohists say“There is a horse” (you ma), they appear to bemaking a claim to the effect that a certain objectxresembles the modelm for horses. If they state this with thedemonstrativebi (“this”), then they are makingthe further claim that some objectx to which they stand in acertain relation (likely of perceptual acquaintance) resembles themodelm for horses. Note also that the Mohists recognize thatobjects do not always resemble their standards exactly; sometimes itis only partial, in which case the object of reference must resembleit “in the appropriate way”, according to a criterion(yi). Presumably, this criterion identifies something salientin the comparison that remains consistent across linguistic contexts.Zhuangzi’s point would then amount to the claim that no salienceconditions are ever invariable across linguistic contexts. Theuniqueness of each act of reference undermines the possibility ofidentifying any contextually invariant rule, since the conditions ofsuccessful reference involve facts not only about the relations ofnames and objects but also about the relations of acquaintance one haswith those objects. Indeed, given the great emphasis on indexicalityin theZhuangzi, some scholars have claimed that Zhuangziholds the thesis that all language is indexical. This is a view thatcannot be defended here; readers may consult Hansen 1992 for a lengthytreatment.

5. Xunzi’s Confucian Appropriation of Mohist Logic

Significantly more so than other major philosophers of the WarringStates Period, the Mohists believed that proper ethical conduct, andthe uses of language essential to its realization, could be determinedby the ability of the common citizen to distinguish, independently ofgovernment authority and by rational means, real similarities anddifferences in the nuances of ethical action. Zhuangzi’sskeptical arguments called much of this belief into question, but leftlittle in its place to placate the demands of effective governance andorderly rule. The Confucian philosopher Xunzi of the late WarringStates Period sought to reestablish ethics on positive, constructivefoundations, but without succumbing to the frustrating Daoistrejoinders that put so much of Mohism in doubt.

On the surface, Xunzi’s theories of logic and language resemblethose of the Mohists, and he makes great use of the doctrines of theMohistCanons to develop his own arguments. But underneath wefind Confucian presuppositions that diverge radically from the Mohistparadigm. Zhuangzi seized on indexicality to make the case that namescannot be used invariably across linguistic contexts. Reacting to theproblematic task of identifying impeccable salience conditions inperception or thought to determine how a name is to be used, Xunzi putZhuangzi’s arguments to use to make the case that thecorrectness conditions of language, if there are to be any at all,must be determined by convention. Since these conventions areultimately arbitrary, they cannot be established by the Mohists’methods of discourse or argumentation. They have to be determined byauthority, the rule of sage-kings who institute the conventions oflanguage as they deem fit through the promotion of proper socialconduct and the suppression of deviant behavior.

Xunzi thus reasserted the Confucian tradition of imposing order ontosociety through uncompromising but benevolent rule to ensure that theanarchy of moral discourse that abounds in its absence does notculminate in the deterioration of civil society. He held these viewsnot merely because they offered a pragmatic solution toZhuangzi’s radical skepticism, but also because they wereconsistent with his cynical view of human nature. Our nature isinherently corruptible and bad, incapable of sustaining civil order ifleft to itself, and therefore demands correction by the institutionsof society. More generally, and quite against the convictions of hisDaoist counterparts, Xunzi held that morality is an invention tocontrol man’s nature, because nature itself, in its endlesstransformations and unpredictable spontaneity, cannot be relied on toconstrain human passion sufficiently to maintain the requisites ofsocial harmony.

In practice, Xunzi’s philosophical method follows much the samecourse as the Mohists’. He takes it upon himself to analyze the“purpose of having names”, the “evidence forassimilating and differentiating”, and the “basicrequirements for instituting names” (Xunzi, Book 22).However, for Xunzi, reason must stop short of justifying what actionsmay serve as models for ethical conduct. The Mohists held that anaction is admissible if it accords with general considerations ofutility. This makes the justification of the action contingent on thecircumstances surrounding the action’s consequences, whetherthey lead to the enrichment of society, and whether they contribute tothe realization of the principle of universal love. Determiningwhether the action is justified thus prescribes the use of reasonindependently of judgments of authority. In Xunzi’s view, thisappeal to utility implies a use of reason that his own ethics wouldforbid, because the actions of a sage are not to be justified byanything independently of their intrinsic moral authority. Since thecustoms instituted by the sage are essentially stipulated as models ofappropriate conduct, reason plays no role in their identification assuch to the common individual.

Notably, the hypostasization of the notion of a model of ethicalconduct (fa) in early Chinese thought is largely acontribution of the Mohists, who used it liberally in place of theConfucian appeal to the authority of tradition. But Xunzi found littleuse for it except in reference to the very Confucian customs theMohists attempted to supplant. Indeed, the reason of the commonindividual is out of place here because the ability to correctlyidentify these models is a talent requiring years of cultivation andmastery, which only the intellectual elites of society would beexpected to attain. Proper conduct must be transmitted througheducation from these elites, ultimately from those in high office whohave the benefit of a life of education in proper governance.

Such presuppositions have important ramifications in Xunzi’stheories of naming and reference. Acts of naming are decided not byreason, but by convention, and Xunzi attributes the authority toestablish these conventions to the sage-kings of later antiquity:

As for the names established by the later kings, for names ofpunishments follow the Shang dynasty, for names of titles the Chou,for cultural names the ceremonies… (Xunzi, Book22)

Common people are prohibited from questioning the mandates oflinguistic conventions:

Hence hair-splitting wordings and invention of names on your ownauthority, to disorder correct names and put people in doubt andconfusion, multiplying argument and litigation between persons, are tobe pronounced the worst of subversions, to be condemned like the crimeof falsifying tallies and measures. (Xunzi, Book 22)

Xunzi avoids one of his own subversions by restricting his task tofiguring out how the conventions established by authority can serve asexamples for the common citizen, and this requires (much as theMohists thought) identifying the conditions by which one extends thenames so designated to other objects or actions that are appropriatelysimilar to them.

It is in this matter that our common reason plays its critical role,which Xunzi understands in terms of our capacity to use the evidenceof perception to make appropriate discriminations. For example, onesees two shapes, one triangular, the other square. Nothing in thisdifferentiation of patterns forces one to attribute the name“triangular” to the first and “square” to thesecond. A single name could just as well be used for all three andfour sided polygons. However, the senses have the effect ofencouraging a distinct name for each; they are “evidence”(yuan, causes, means) for assimilating and differentiatingobjects in language. For instance, one may regard the assertion“Mountains and abysses are level” as inadmissible (orfalse), because it is contradicted by our perception of the non-levelrelation of the two geographical objects. This is the case, for Xunzi,even though it is convention, in the final analysis, that determineshow the terms “mountain” and “abyss” are to beused. Xunzi’s point is not that the analysis of meanings somehowfixes how the terms of language are to be used, but that whenconvention does “fix ahead” (qi) the meanings ofthese terms, one is to use the senses to determine whether the objectsto which they refer are to be treated as the same or different.

Xunzi’s insistence that convention is at the bottom of all actsof naming gave him the liberty to favor simple, commonsense solutionsto semantic puzzles that aroused such contention among the disputantsof other schools. Recall that the Mohists argued that while robbersare people, it does not follow that “killing robbers is killingpeople”. Their aim, apparently, was to reconcile theirutilitarian ethics with their doctrine of universal love. Theyregarded “loving all people” as compatible with thejustified execution of criminals on the supposition that the phrase“killing robbers” (justified execution) was not“killing people” (murder), and hence not inconsistent withtheir ethics of “loving (all) people”. Xunzi, whoseConfucian ethics were not challenged by this apparent inconsistency,remained unpersuaded by the Mohists’ odd appeal to the idiom. Inhis view, the assertion “Killing robbers is killingpeople” is analyzed compositionally in the same way as“Riding white horses is riding horses”, making it likewiseadmissible.

In rejecting the Mohists’ judgment on this point, Xunzi is notcontesting the Mohists’ general theory of inference. He is onlydisputing its application in this case. While there is no evidencethat Xunzi held that all complex meaning is strictly compositional, hewas disinclined to take seriously the kinds of exceptions that theMohists garnered for their ethical views. His preference seems to havebeen for a simpler theory that accommodates terms of whatever levelsof generality are necessary for purposes of communicative clarity. Thecomplex “killing people” is better analyzedcompositionally if another simple term of appropriate generality(e.g., “murder”) is at hand to avoid the confusion:

If a single name is enough to communicate, make it single; if not,combine. (Xunzi, Book 22)

As a rule of thumb, single terms are more general than the complexesin which they occur:

If the single is nowhere in conflict with the combined, it is the moregeneral; but general though it is, there is no harm in it.(Xunzi, Book 22)

No harm, that is, in terms of whatever levels of generality arenecessary for communicative clarity (e.g., “bird”,“animal”), up to the broadest level of generality(“thing”). Like the Mohists, Xunzi’s theory ofinference is based on the notion that a model must serve as a standardof resemblance: naming an object is like “measuring an unknownlength by a footrule”. He was therefore inclined to drawinferences in much the same way. The assertion “x is ananimal” is a valid inference from the claim “xresembles the modelm for animal” on the assumptionthat anything resemblingm is an animal.

Similarly, “A white horse is a horse” is a validinference, in Xunzi’s view, from the claim:

The model \(m_1\) for “white horse” resembles the model\(m_2\) for “horse”.

Xunzi’s reference to this example in particular in Book 22 oftheXunzi is likely his response to the paradoxical statement“White horses are not horses”, famously asserted by thesophist Gongsun Long probably as a foil to the Mohists’ theoriesof naming and reference (Gongsun Long may himself have once been aMohist; see the entrySchool of Names for further discussion). The inference works, presumably, because\(m_2\) serves as a model for “horse” irrespective of itscolor. Since color is not a relevant criterion of resemblance,“horse” functions as a term of greater generality.

In all of this, there is no disagreement with Mohist views. Thedisagreement arises in the analysis of particulars, which the Mohistsfelt could substantively determine the outcomes of ethical disputes.Given that convention lies at the bottom of all acts of naming, Xunziabandons any supposition that semantics (or even reason, narrowlyconstrued in the Mohists’ sense of disputation) can be theground of ethics. On the other hand, Xunzi’s deference toauthority leaves one to wonder what principles of reason an educatedelite would use in determining why a given set of conventions inlanguage are more appropriate than others. It can be assumed thattheir choices would not be completely arbitrary, but that they wouldbe guided by the very faculties of discrimination in perception thatthe Mohists argued were at the foundations of our common reason.Indeed, much in spite of the admirable clarity with which hearticulated his views on the role of language in ethical conduct,Xunzi leaves the reader with an unresolved tension between what he hadhoped to accomplish in his own philosophical analyses and the mandatesof those higher officials to whose authority he admonishes us to yield(see the entryXunzi for further details).

6. Concluding Remarks

Among Chinese philosophical schools of the pre-Han era, it is thelater Mohists who deserve the greatest credit for pioneering andsystematizing the studies of language and logic. In the context of ageneral theoretical framework based on precisely formulateddefinitions, they developed a workable theory of analogical inferencethat was sensitive to the idiosyncratic semantic contributions ofterms in combination. Awareness of the limitations of compositionalityprobably led them away from the development of a theory of logicalforms, but it stimulated insights about intensional phenomena inlanguage that prompted more sophisticated defenses of their ethicalviews, and encouraged a broad understanding of how language functionsin communicative discourse that warrants ongoing consideration today.Xunzi may have reached a new height in the rigor and clarity withwhich he presented his logical and linguistic views, but he did notsurpass his Mohist forebears in originality, seeking primarily toutilize their insights in support of a largely Confucian ethicalagenda. While the Mohists were clearly aware of many of thelimitations of their own methods of reasoning, they neverthelessretained the hope that a sophisticated analysis of language wouldreveal real similarities and differences in experience that wouldreliably guide ethical action. It is this general hope that was thefocus of Daoist critics like Zhuangzi, who argued from radicallyperspectivalist assumptions that no language, however refined, isadequate to the task of providing consistent normative standards.Whether or not this claim is true is still a matter of debate, withscholars of Chinese philosophy today leaning one way or another onancient conceptions of the roles of language and logic in humanthought and action.

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• Mou, Bo, 2016, “How the Validity of the Parallel Inferenceis Possible: From the Ancient Mohist Diagnosis to a Modern LogicalTreatment of Its Semantic-Syntactic Structure”,History andPhilosophy of Logic, 37: 301–324.
• Robins, Dan, 2010, “The Later Mohists and Logic”,History and Philosophy of Logic, 31(3): 247–285.doi:10.1080/01445340.2010.500920
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• Shun, Kwong-Loi, 1997,Mencius and Early Chinese Thought,Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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General Surveys of Classical Chinese Thought

• Feng, Yu-lan, 1952,A History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol.1, Derk Bodde (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Hansen, Chad, 1992,A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nivison, David Shepherd, 1999, “The Classical PhilosophicalWritings”, inThe Cambridge History of Ancient China,Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.
• Schwartz, Benjamin, 1985,The World of Thought in AncientChina, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

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