 The presupposition here is that people cannot live together cooperatively or harmoniously if they cannot communicate with one another effectively—if they are inadvertently calling different things by the same names or the same things by different names. They will think they are agreeing or disagreeing with one another when they aren’t, and their intentions will be frustrated or blocked – notably, not by the conflict of wills that would result from ambition, greed or selfishness (which might be true apart from this), but by something more basic: the dumb incompetence of failing to use language properly. The solution, accordingly, is to determine the correct use of language, the proper conditions under which its terms are used. “Is this object a horse?” “Is this ruler a king?” As Xunzi indicates, part of the method here hinges on the descriptive program of comparing objects in question to others that are referred to by the same names and making judgments of similarity or difference. But Xunzi goes deeper. To make a judgment of similarity or difference, certain criteria must be used. But what, in turn, justifies these criteria? Xunzi insists that the analysis of language must also “clarify the noble and base,” and this seems intended as an answer to just this question; it explains why he identifies it as his first basic purpose in the analysis of terms. For only then is one in a position to undertake the second purpose of distinguishing the same and the different. That is, we know that a judgment of similarity or difference is correct when it distinguishes the noble from the base, the good from the bad. Xunzi’s prioritizing of these two basic purposes suggests that the ultimate aim of the investigation of language is to guide behavior, to serve the normative function of providing standards for clarifying communicative intentions in a way that establishes a justificatory framework for resolving ethical disputes. Such a view seems to have been held widely in early China; it is suggested in the Analects of Confucius in regards to the ordering of names, and it is clearly evident as a general orientation in the writings of the Mohists, who hoped that the analysis of language would help to reveal semantic distinctions relevant to proper ethical conduct. The result was an inevitable blending of disinterested analysis and definitional stipulation, insofar as it was held that language as a medium for human discourse must not be neutral with respect to ethical aims.