 According to Chad Hansen (1989: 111), Mengzi did not view language as being an innate system which contained the essence of proper social norms, and instead believed that all traditional Confucian conventions were ‘wired’ into the human heart-mind (xin). However, this view has been challenged by other sinologists (e.g., Shun 1997; Van Norden 2000; Ivanhoe 2002), who have pointed out that only the four ‘sprouts’ (si duan 四端) of essential moral qualities (Ivanhoe 2002: 43) were innate to heart-mind, and that these had to be properly cultivated in order to enable human beings to comprehend the world and act in accordance with moral virtues (Lee 2018: 36–9). But given that proper names (zheng ming) did not represent a system of (moral) recognition for Mengzi, such cultivation was not based on a shared linguistic system or consensus (Mengzi CTP: Jinxin shang, 15). This position allowed him to formulate a series of well-grounded arguments against the challenges presented by the Mohist school.