 Besides the contexts in which epistêmê of forms results in imitating them, the dialogues offer another important way of reconciling knowledge of forms and technê. In the Sophist, the Visitor from Elea elaborates an analogy between technê and dialectic, whose objects are clearly forms. He begins with the idea that there is a technê for telling which letters join to which, just as there is technê for which musical notes mingle and which do not (253a ff). Then the Visitor turns to the kinds (genê) that he has just introduced: being, rest, motion, sameness, and difference (254d-e). Making an analogy with the grammatical and musical technai, he posits a sort of knowledge (epistêmê) for showing which kinds harmonize and which do not. This is also the knowledge of how to discriminate according to kinds, which the Visitor calls dialectic. While this knowledge of how to distinguish and to harmonize forms is compared to craft, it is not productive, the way carpentry is productive. However, in the Statesman, the Visitor takes up the relation of dialectic, conceived of as theoretical, with practical knowledge. He contrasts epistêmai that are practical — like carpentry — and those which are for knowledge only (258d). The Visitor calls them respectively the practical (praktikê) and the theoretical (gnôstikê — clearly related to gnôsis and gignôskein)(259d). The practical epistêmai cover what are otherwise called crafts; however, the theoretical is subdivided into (a) epistêmai like calculation, which only judges or distinguishes the things known and (b) epistêmai like that of the architect (architektôn), which command and are thus called commanding (epitaktikê) (259e). The Visitor may seem to have blurred his original distinction between practical and theoretical by including commanding knowledge (epitaktikê) in the latter category. Still, the notion that at least part of theoretical knowledge only judges the things known gives us a basis for distinguishing theoretical from practical knowledge. The former entails craft-like skill; but the skill remains focused on the objects of knowledge. In calculation the objects are numbers; in dialectic they are the kinds. This kind of knowledge has no product separate from its activity; by contrast, practical knowledge actually produces something separate, in the way carpentry does. This way of expressing the difference suggests that theoretical epistêmê is not so much a body of knowledge as an ability to grasp very abstract sorts of distinctions. 