White horses and orphan colts

[robinturner]

On the recent discussion of radial categories (see replies to Oops, I did it again), what do the linguists/philosophers out there make of these statements attributed to Huizi (a leading member of the "School of Names"):

"A white horse is not a horse."
"An orphan colt has never had a mother."

Correction (28/6/01)

Oops, that wasn't Huizi, it was Gong-sun Long (the other main person in that particular school). Huizi (also known as Hui Shi) was the guy who said things like "The heavens are as low as the earth; mountains are on the same level as marshes."

Comments

Re: functional illiteracy

[solri.livejournal.com]

My guess is that if you can just about get through Spot the Dog but can't fill in a job application form you're functionally illiterate without being totally illiterate.

There again ILLITERATE is one of those weird categories that change according to context and communicative intent, so I may describe a student as "illiterate" because they hadn't read Plato. Then you've got all the radial categories like COMPUTER ILLITERATE. In the context of the discussion of my last post, I could be described as "phenomenologically illiterate", perhaps!