 As this conception of communication as “connecting thoughts” suggests, the Mohists see language as enabling speakers to express their yì 意 (thought, intention, point) (A92), a view shared by other early Chinese theories of language, including those of the Xunzi and The Annals of Lu Buwei. However, the role of “thought” or “intention” (yì 意) in these ancient Chinese theories is distinct from that of ideas, meanings, or intensions in certain familiar Western views. In Western folk theory—what we might call the Idea Theory or a  “dog-legged”[9]  theory of language—a word’s meaning is the mental idea it stands for, which in turn represents some object in the world. The content of the idea explains why the word is used as it is, such as why it refers to certain things and not others. A well-known difficulty with this view is that it merely moves the explanandum back a step, since the content and function of ideas, a set of inner, private symbols, is just as much in need of explication as the content and function of language, a set of outer, public ones. The Mohist theory makes no detour through ideas or other mental entities to explain semantic content. Instead, the reference of words is explained by similarity relations and by practices for distinguishing the kind of thing designated by each word. The thought (yì 意) expressed by language does not explain why words are used as they are. Rather, the way words are used explains how it is that they can express thoughts. “Expressing thoughts” (shū yì 抒意) (NO11) or “connecting thoughts” (tōng yì 通意) (B41) is communication, the aim or result of using language, not an explanation of why terms refer to the things they do. One canon (B41) depicts a scenario in which we come to understand the thought (yì 意) of a speaker who uses an unfamiliar word by asking to what the word refers. The point is that if we can determine reference, we can communicate. There is no need to consider meanings or “ideas” corresponding to words, and indeed intensional concepts play no role in the Mohist theory. 