 In essence, Sorai believed that by rightly defining words he was providing the foundations for the integrity of a rightly governed social and political order. Ultimately, then, Confucians and Neo-Confucians in their repeated reaffirmations of the importance of language and meaning were not simply indulging in philological exercises or arcane semantic research. Instead, they were engaged in an effort to recover the way (C: dao/J: michi) for the sake of establishing a means to sagely truth, and a ground for a righteous political order.