 Xunzi’s famous essay on language, “Rectifying Names” (“Zhengming” 正名) includes some impressive insights into the nature of verbal communication (William S-Y. Wang 1989: 186–89), but the primary concern of the chapter is morality, not linguistics (Fraser 2016: 293–96). The thrust of the essay is easily missed because a few of Xunzi’s comments sound as though they came out of a modern pragmatics textbook, e.g., “Names have no inherent appropriateness. We designate them [by some word] in order to name them” (Xunzi 22.2g). Although this may sound like something that Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) could have written, Xunzi was not interested in the same questions as modern linguists. In “Rectifying Names”, Xunzi also discusses sophistic paradoxes that were rampant in his day (the most famous being “A white horse is not a  horse”),[9]  dividing them into three typological categories. His conclusion discloses that his main purpose is not a proper taxonomy of falsidical paradoxes (for this term, see Quine 1976: 3), but an assertion of the moral purpose of language: 