to external reality and is intrinsically true.

Conversely, when a statement is not true, it cannot correspond to the facts. The listener tries to align it with reality, but it refuses to match or agree. Someone may then imagine that the expositor—or even the listener—failed to grasp the speaker’s intention because it was too abstruse; yet the real reason is simply that the statement itself does not accord with reality, and therefore cannot be made to fit it. At times another person, out of goodwill toward the speaker, may assume that the statement does in fact match external reality and think that his own failure to understand it stems from its subtlety; but that, too, is not the case.

Their assertion that a “real definition” is exceedingly difficult and that only a handful of people truly need it belongs to this same issue. For if by “real definition” they mean what they claim, then no such thing exists outside the mind. They imagine that the entity in itself is composed of certain necessary attributes—some broader than the entity, others precisely coextensive with it—while omitting other necessary attributes that are equally broad or equally coextensive; they further hold that its very reality is made up solely of those selected attributes and that only the definition captures this reality. All of that is false.

Their claim that the entity is constituted by some of its necessary attributes but not others is false; indeed, the claim that it is a composite of attributes at all is false. Their claim that it possesses an external, objective reality portrayed exclusively by the definition is likewise false. In actuality, the thing being defined—the item singled out by a name or by a definition—may exist outside the mind, or it may exist only in the mind of the one who coined the name or definition, even though he supposes it to have external existence when it does not.

Hence it is said that a definition may sometimes relate to the name and at other times to the named reality; one may also say that a definition can pertain either to the name of a thing or to its essence. A definition tied merely to the name may still coincide with external reality, yet the main point is this: sometimes a definition serves to distinguish what the word intends from what it does not, and sometimes it serves to distinguish what actually exists among concrete entities from what does not. Such differentiation is achieved through the former process: the distinction in the mind must correspond to the distinction in external reality, and the distinction that reaches the listener comes by way of the distinction already present in the mind of the speaker. And God knows best.