White horse not horse: Making sense of a negative logic

Kung‐sun Lung's thesis on ‘White Horse [is] not Horse’ has been solved by A. C. Graham on the basis of a part/whole logic and by Chad Hansen on that and a ‘mass‐noun’ hypothesis. We present it as a case of reducing White Horse to its two most telling marks and then, on the basis of the good Sense (instead of Reference) in a Negative Logic—the pragmatics of locating X as the remainder left over when all non‐X's have been removed—show how a stable hand, receiving an order for White Horse would scan first for Horse by removing all non‐horse shapes and then for White by removing all colours except White. This way we can prove how indeed “A request for White Horse cannot be satisfied by Black and Brown that fills an order for Horse... (because) to exclude some colour [in the second scan] is not the same as to exclude yet no colour [in the first scan].” No part/whole or mass‐sum is presumed. The whole discussion is set in the context of shifting criteria for judging name from Confucius to Hsun‐tzu.