Waley calls this phenomenon ‘The Language Crisis’. His description suggests it was as though a wave of consciousness had spread among the thinkers in China. They began to question the nature of language and its connection with reality. As Waley rightly points out, there is a peculiarity about the Chinese language that further complicates issues of language-reality correspondence. Each Chinese character (or name: ming) has a particular meaning, and how the characters are combined, for instance, to form a compound name or a proposition, is an important matter. It was also critical to understand how these ‘names’ might accurately reflect reality. Both the Confucian discussion of correcting names (zhengming) and the Mohist preoccupation with standards (fa) attempt to deal with these issues by determining the correct application of names in order to regulate society.