 The Mohists refer to the field of activity in which we support, evaluate, and argue over assertions as biàn 辯, a word interpretable as “dialectics,” “distinction drawing,” “discriminating,” or “disputation.” (For convenience, we will translate it as “disputation,” though, as we will see, Chinese thinkers understand it very literally as a process of “discriminating,” or drawing distinctions.) Early Chinese texts describe disputation at several levels of  generality.[23]  In its broadest sense, disputation is extensive in scope, covering aspects of semantics, argumentation, logic, and rhetoric. It is comparable to the Greek notion of dialectics, considered loosely as debate or reasoning aimed at knowledge. The Mohists’ “Lesser Selection” (Xiǎo Qǔ) depicts it as a general process of reasoning and judgment that covers virtually all cognitive activity, including topics corresponding to politics, semantics, natural science, and ethics. 