 According to Wang, this inability is in part explained by the unwillingness of scholars to innovate and to break with the sages. In the chapter Duizuo (Replies on Creation), Wang confronts the commonly held view, expressed in the Analects of Confucius, that it is best to transmit the teachings of the ancient sages rather than to create or innovate. “Creation” (zuo 作) as such was looked at in a negative way in the Han, despite a wealth of innovation in this period. Using his proposed method, Wang aimed to distinguish true (shi 實) statements from false (xu 虛) statements. Wang understood false statements as ones that tend to have a grip on us for a variety of reasons. Wang was not concerned with falsehoods that we have no inclination to believe, but rather with ones that have an intrinsic attractiveness. He argued that “flowery” (hua 花) words have this feature, attracting us due to their style, rather than their veridicality. A whole host of human biases contributes to making certain kinds of falsehoods attractive to us. In addition to having a preference for flowery words, we are also inclined toward those statements and teachings that present us in a good light, feeding our sense of superiority, our vanity, or advancing our personal interests. It is this category of statement for which Wang reserves the category of “false” (xu), using a term that also has the sense of “empty”. Xu statements are attractive statements that lack the important features that make statements true. What makes a statement true (shi) is that it has the features we generally seek in evaluating statements, rather than only in particular cases with certain options attractive to us. These features will be different depending on the kind of statement we are evaluating. A true moral statement will have different truth-making features than a statement of medicine or geology.