 It should be noted that those who rejected the Mohists’ views often concentrated their objections on the logical presuppositions of the Mohists’ methodology of disputation by pointing out counterexamples to the kinds of analogical inferences that the Mohists were inclined to take for granted. A.C. Graham, for instance, who did more than any other Western philosopher at reconstructing and analyzing Mohist philosophical doctrines about language and logic in the early decades following their rediscovery by Chinese philologists, nevertheless described the opposing Daoist philosophies (particularly as espoused in the Zhuangzi) as “anti-rational”, representative of an “assault on reason”, a “rejection”, and even “mockery”, of logic (Graham 1989). Yet some argue that a great many of the Daoist objections one finds in the Zhuangzi are motivated more by a general skepticism about the possibility of identifying invariable standards of discrimination in language than about ineradicable defects in the very human capacity for reason. One can be a skeptic, for instance, about the role of necessity in reference without having anything disparaging to say about our ability to evaluate the consistency of a theory on logical grounds or reject it by the method of reductio ad absurdum. A number of scholars have even claimed that Daoism, in particular, is not the anti-rational philosophy it has been taken to be, but in some ways an attempt at carrying the methods of reason to their ultimate limits, much as Wittgenstein in his Tractatus attempts to tease out the boundary of the sayable through sustained rational reflection. Zhuangzi, for all his skepticism about the utility of natural language as a medium for the representation of truth and inclinations towards mysticism, might nonetheless have still venerated reason, independently of language, as the principal mode of thought through which one is able to discern right conduct in accordance with the Dao (or Way). This view is controversial, but scholars have not been averse to it (cf. the general view of Wing-tsit Chan: “He is mystical, but at the same time he follows reason as the leading light”, 1963: 177), and there seems to be an increasing interest in its viability (e.g., Alt 1991). Evidence for it is considered in  section 4  below.