  The Mohist conception of knowledge is thus fundamentally practical, not representational or theoretical. Having knowledge is not a matter of having a correct representation in one’s mind or being able to give a theoretical description of some state of affairs, but of being able to do something correctly in practice — specifically, being able to distinguish various kinds (lei) of things from one another. Propositional knowledge, to the limited extent that it is addressed, is implicitly explained terms of the ability to distinguish kinds properly: To know that a is F is to know to distinguish a as the kind of thing denoted by the term ‘F’.