 This parallel between the forms of “sameness” (tóng) the Mohists identify and our use of to be strongly suggests that the concept of “sameness” plays a theoretical role for classical Chinese thinkers comparable to that of to be or the copula in European languages. It is likely that the Mohists and other early Chinese thinkers implicitly understood an assertion we would translate into the form ‘A is B’ as claiming that A and B are “the same,” in one of the several senses specified above. Evaluating the truth of such an assertion would be understood as evaluating whether A and B are indeed “the same” in the relevant way. More generally, early Chinese theorists probably regarded assertion, judgment, and reasoning all as processes of distinguishing whether things are “the same” or not. Stating a fact about the world would have been seen as a matter of identifying a sameness or difference, in one of four (or more) senses of  “sameness.”[16]  “White horses are horses” would be interpreted as in effect claiming that white horses and horses are “the same,” and “Oxen are not horses” as claiming that oxen and horses are “different.” If these interpretive hypotheses are correct, then it is no exaggeration to say that distinguishing same and different—in effect, pattern recognition or analogical extension—is the core explanatory notion underlying classical Chinese philosophy of language, epistemology, and logic.