The core idea of modism is that our ways of talking express our ways of thinking and that our ways of thinking in turn express the ways things are. Thus, we have a distinction between three types of “modes”: the modes of signification, which belong to language, the modes of understanding (modi intelligendi), which are the ways we grasp reality, and finally the modes of being (modi essendi).5 It’s vital to the modists that each thing out in the world really
