Editing Hui Shi (section)

=== Fondness for Analogies ===

A dialogue in the [[Shuo Yuan]] portrays Hui Shi as having a tendency to overuse analogies ({{lang|zh|譬}} {{Transliteration|zh|pi}}, which can also be translated as "illustrative examples") with Hui Shi justifying this habit with the claim that communication is impossible without analogies:<ref name="sep"/>

{{blockquote|A client said to the King of Liang, “In talking about things, Hui Shi is fond of using analogies. If you don’t let him use analogies, he won’t be able to speak.” The King said, “Agreed.” The next day he saw Hui Shi and said, “I wish that when you speak about things, you speak directly, without using analogies.” Hui Shi said, “Suppose there’s a man here who doesn’t know what a dan is. If he says, ‘What are the features of a dan like?’ and we answer, saying, ‘The features of a dan are like a dan,’ then would that communicate it?” The King said, “It would not.” “Then if we instead answered, ‘The features of a dan are like a bow, but with a bamboo string,’ then would he know?” The King said, “It can be known.” Hui Shi said, “Explanations are inherently a matter of using what a person knows to communicate what he doesn’t know, thereby causing him to know it. Now if you say, ‘No analogies,’ that’s inadmissible.” The King said, “Good!”}}

A. C. Graham argues that this philosophical position suggests some affinity between Hui Shi and the [[Mohism|Mohists]], in their shared opinion that "the function of names is to communicate that an object is like the objects one knows by the name"<ref>{{cite book|title=Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China|first=Angus|last=Graham|page=81}}</ref><ref name="sep"/>