 There is a great deal of controversy surrounding how these techniques are to be understood and what their relationship is. It has been argued that they comprise the steps of a single, complex inference procedure in which a claim is established. However, this view is difficult to justify because it requires supporting the claim that each step is somehow necessary, serving as an essential premise for the next. An easier and more commonly accepted view is that each technique may operate independently to establish a point. Yang (2020) argues that each serves to make an inference in its own right: the first two are used to infer in each case that a proposition is true, while the second two are used to infer in each case that a proposition is false. By contrast, Robins (2010) argues that each is an instance of the general method of reasoning by analogy that was common throughout most of early Chinese thought. The Mohists are clarifying four different ways in which this general method might be instantiated. The first two cover the domains of reference and meaning, as distinguished above. Analogy (pi) indicates the method of extending kinds, employing models of comparison in perception or thought by acts of reference to identify or explain what something is. Parallelizing (mou) is the Mohist extension of this idea into the world of linguistic forms. “Pushing” and “pulling” hint at the pragmatic circumstances in disputation in which one attempts to establish a claim on the basis of its analogy with claims the other side has already accepted.