 The Mohists are crisscrossing here between reference and meaning, between the problems they observe in their analogical theory of naming and those they now identify in their theory of linguistic parallels. Presumably, the Mohist expression “being so” (ran) is a reference to “being of a certain kind”, and “that which makes it so” refers to the conditions under which a thing is admissibly considered to be of that kind. Recall the Mohist observation that objects may resemble one another but not be of the same kind, because they do not resemble one another “in the appropriate way”. Here the Mohists appear to be making the correlative point that two objects may be of the same kind (“their being ‘so’ is the same”), while the conditions that warrant their being treated as of the same kind are not necessarily the same. In the domain of meaning, the Mohists are making the same point: expressions in language may have the same grammatical form, but the conditions by which they are admissibly applied might be different.