 The later Mohists develop a sophisticated naturalistic semantic theory that explains reference, and thus communication, by appeal to speakers’ shared capacity to learn to distinguish different kinds of things on the basis of their characteristic features. As in the Analects, the other parts of the Mozi, and the Xunzi, theoretical attention focuses on the issue of applying names or terms to things correctly, and not on the structure or truth of sentences. (The “Lesser Selection” moves on to consider “expressions” (cí 辭) formed of strings of words, but these are treated along the same lines as terms.) Unlike traditional Western theories of language, such as Lockean conceptualism, the Mohists do not explain the relation between language and the world by appeal to mental ideas or meanings that words stand for. Instead, speakers are understood to communicate by mastering practices for distinguishing (biàn 辯) the referents of names for various kinds of things. By virtue of these practices, members of the same language community know that each general term stands for all similar things of a certain kind (lèi 類). 