As it turns out, the word 'model' is cognate with 'mind', and so is related to 'meaning', as well as the Greek words 'mythos' ('story') and 'mathe' ('lesson'). A model is thus something we can know; and, loosely speaking, all knowing is a form of modeling. According to Psychology, even our fundamental—visual images, audial images, olfactory images, gustatory images, tactile images, and their recalled images: memories—are all types of internal, neural models for survival, based on features of alterior Onticity.⁵ And words, the basic tool of rhetoric, are models in the two-fold sense that 1) they are among the just mentioned audial images, and 2) we use words as signs to construct verbal models in which the symbolic relations of words model the actual relations of things. In Epistemology, the latter is called the correspondence theory of Truth.

Now, according to Semiotics⁶ there are three kinds of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols. But even this list can be simplified a bit more by recognizing that icons and indexes are signs strictly speaking, whereas symbols are so much more. For an index is a sign that denotes its referent by means of a physical relationship between the sign and the referent. A wolf's tracks, for instance, indicate the past presence of a wolf, and are therefore an index of the wolf. The physical relation here is that of causation: the wolf's weight and the dirt's consistency caused the wolf's feet to impress the mud. But the wolf's footprint is not only an index of the wolf; it is also an icon of the wolf's foot, because the underlying relation for icons is sensory resemblance. That is: if a sign looks like its referent, then it is an icon of it. Note, however, that visual resemblance is not the only kind of sensory resemblance. Some words, for instance, sound like what they refer to, and so they, too, are icons: audial icons. Thus onomatopoeic words like 'crash' or 'bang' or even 'loud' are all iconic. Of course, most words are not icons, but many are indexes. Names, for instance, are indexes; and nouns, which are "name-like", are indexical. That's "indexical" and not "indexes", because nouns have not only the simple relation of "christening" or 'dubbing'; they are also related to other words, and this makes them different from mere names per se.