The benefit of names is that they serve as reminders rather than images: by the act of naming one acquires a knowledge that singles the named out from everything else, or at least a knowledge obtained by analogy.

Ibn Sīnā’s admission that some things are conceived in and of themselves:

The sharpest of their number affirm—concerning many matters that others have attempted to define—that no real definition can disclose their very quiddity; at most one can give a definition that merely signals and distinguishes. Ibn Sīnā says in al-Shifāʾ:

“We say: the notions of ‘existent,’ ‘thing,’ and ‘necessary’ are imprinted in the soul by a primary inscription; that impression does not need to be fetched by concepts better known than it.

Just as, in the realm of assent, there are first principles accepted for their own sake and through which assent is granted to other matters—so, when such principles do not present themselves to the mind, or when the word that designates them is not understood, one cannot reach what is known by means of them. Thus a ‘definition’ that seeks to bring them to mind, or a term that is meant to point to them, is not truly imparting knowledge of something absent from our nature; it only alerts the listener to what the speaker intends or inclines toward. This may even be done through matters that are, in themselves, more obscure than the thing to be defined, yet by some circumstance or turn of phrase have become more familiar.

Likewise in the realm of conceptions: certain things are first principles of conception—concepts conceived for their own sake. When one tries to point them out, this is not, in truth, a definition of an unknown; it is merely a prompting, a calling to mind by means of a verbal sign that may, in itself, be more obscure than the very thing indicated.”