Here Peirce makes a statement that is decisive for understanding the relationship between his pragmatic definition of truth and any theory of truth that leaves it solely and simply a matter of representations corresponding with their objects. Peirce, like Kant before him, recognizes Aristotle's distinction between a "nominal definition", a definition in name only, and a "real definition", one that states the function of the concept, the reason for conceiving it, and so indicates the "essence", the underlying "substance" of its object. This tells us the sense in which Peirce entertained a "correspondence theory of truth", namely, a purely nominal sense. To get beneath the superficiality of the nominal definition it is necessary to analyze the notion of correspondence in greater depth.