 A related explanation of the sophist’s view is that he confuses terms that refer at different levels of generality, or, equivalently, simply refuses to recognize that terms can refer at different levels of generality. Xunzi, whose career largely overlapped with Gongsun Long’s, introduced the concept of a “common name” (gong ming), or general term, which may refer to things at different levels of generality (22.2f). Xunzi pointed out that sometimes we refer to things by a single name, such as ‘horse’, and sometimes, to communicate more precisely, we use a “compound” name (what we would think of as a noun phrase), such as ‘white horse’. Provided one of these two kinds of names is more general, we can use both without their interfering with each other. This is roughly the same point Kong Chuan made in insisting that ‘horse’ always refers to all horses and that adding ‘white’ to it merely narrows its reference by specifying the horses’ color. In each case, the animals denoted by ‘horse’ are still horses. “White Horse” deliberately ignores this point. 