 A second reason for this oversight is in the fact that those writings of classical Chinese philosophers that did largely survive the vicissitudes of history—particularly the major works of Daoists like Zhuangzi and Laozi, but also those writings attributable to Confucius and his philosophical descendants—tend to embody what appear to be unfavorable appraisals of, or at least alternatives to, philosophical methods that rely heavily on suppositions about the power of discursive rationality at establishing true ethical, metaphysical, or scientific principles. Such methods take for granted the aptitude of the human intellect to logically deduce true, informative statements about particular objects, events, or states of affairs from general propositions, or establish correct generalizations by induction from particular instances, a practice less self-consciously avowed in most philosophical traditions in China that were (unlike Mohism) stimulated by centuries of well-established sociocultural practices. Arguably, much of the interest we see in the study of logic in early Western philosophy was stimulated by the supposition of a dichotomy between appearance and reality, which prompted philosophers to wonder whether judgments or theories about what appears to us do or do not correspond to the structure or content of a mind-independent, objective reality. The obvious case is Plato, whose analysis of Forms was inspired by the methods of Euclidean geometry with the intention that it be carried out in a realm of abstraction largely unimpeded by the diffuse and problematic content of sense experience. Aristotle lamented the fact that Plato’s methods suffered from limited applicability to the varieties of experiential phenomena, believing instead that the content of perception does not pose any special problems for the reliability of judgment, but he retained a fundamental interest in the theory of representation and hoped that his system of logic would provide proper normative standards for drawing inferences among the categories we use to identify things.