 Accordingly, yì 意 (thought) is typically associated not with words (míng 名, names), as one would expect if Chinese thinkers held an Idea Theory of meaning, but with “statements” (yán 言) and “expressions” (cí 辭). (An “expression,” in ancient Chinese philosophy of language, is any string of two or more words used to communicate a thought.) Understanding the yì (thought) expressed by an assertion or command is in effect “getting the point.” For this reason, in some contexts yì (thought) plays a conceptual role resembling that of “speaker’s  meaning.”[10]  However, other passages suggest that it is not a semantic notion at all, but more akin to “what one is thinking” or one’s intentions. One canon tells us that “trustworthiness is statements agreeing with yì (thought)” (A14), a remark that is difficult to understand if yì is interpreted as a semantic concept. For if yì (thought) were speaker’s meaning, then what speakers say could not fail to agree with their yì, and if it were literal meaning, then failing to conform to it would show only that the speakers use words incorrectly, not that they are untrustworthy. People are trustworthy when what they say genuinely reflects what they have in mind, particularly what they intend to do. The best interpretation of yì in contexts concerning language, then, seems to be as a general notion of “thought” or a more specific notion of “intention,” and not as semantic  meaning.[11] 