 The Gongsun Longzi has inspired a vast exegetical literature in both Asian and European languages, with no consensus in sight as to the significance and theoretical basis of its arguments. The interpretation proposed here must be considered only one of several potentially defensible approaches (others are noted below). In the case of the “White Horse” dialogue, the text is generally clear enough. (“Indicating Things,” on the other hand, appears to be intentionally obscure.) The scholarly controversy concerns what theory and implicit premises to ascribe to the text so that the arguments come out as cogent defenses of a reasonable position. As Graham says, the interpretive obstacle is “the difficulty of finding an angle of approach from which the arguments will make sense.…The arguments are clear, yet the first seems an obvious non sequitur…and the rest seem to assume an elementary confusion of identity and class membership” (1989: 82). Introducing his own interpretation, he says, “No one has yet proposed a reading of the dialogue as a consecutive demonstration which does not turn it into an improbable medley of gross fallacies and logical subtleties” (1990: 193). Building on Harbsmeier’s insight that the historical context of Gongsun Long’s disputations has been insufficiently appreciated, we may suspect Graham’s remarks signal interpretive charity gone too far. Given what information we have about Gongsun Long—Harbsmeier’s considerations, the general reputation of the disputers for flippant wordplay, the denunciation of Gongsun Long in the “Under Heaven” essay, and most important, the fact that his contemporaries took his most famous claim to be patently false—we should expect the text to be a “medley of gross fallacies and logical subtleties,” roughly a Chinese analogue to the subtle, fallacious, and deeply amusing arguments of Lewis Carroll. 