 Before the Han dynasty, the social group of which these thinkers were a part was known as the bian zhe—“disputers” or “dialecticians”—because they spent much of their time in “disputation” (bian, also “discrimination” or “distinction drawing”), a form of dialectical persuasion and inquiry aimed fundamentally at “distinguishing” the proper semantic relations between names and the things or kinds of things to which they refer. “Disputers” is thus probably a more appropriate English label for Hui Shi, Gongsun Long, and the others than is the “School of Names,” though it refers not specifically to these figures but to the broader class of scholars to which they belonged. (“Name-distinguishers” or “distinction-disputers” would be even more accurate, though these terms are too clumsy to adopt as English equivalents.) The disputers flourished for about a century and a half as wandering political advisors, counseling rulers throughout pre-unification China. They disappeared with the onset of the Qin dynasty (221 B.C.E.), partly because the political and intellectual climate of the new empire was hostile to their purely theoretical, occasionally flippant inquiries, and partly because with unification their political services became obsolete. 