Míngxué 名學

‘Name studies’. A modern term for the study of names, realities, classification, argument, and knowledge in early Chinese thought. The term first gained prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was sometimes used as a translation of Western ‘logic’. Scholars such as Hú Shì and especially Wǔ Fēibǎi subsequently expanded it into a broad category encompassing Mohist dialectics, the School of Names, and related discussions in Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist texts. In this broad sense, míngxué includes what later scholars often call míngbiàn (‘names and disputation’) and biànxué (‘the study of argumentation’). It is therefore wider in scope than either of those terms and should not be equated simply with logic.