 The schools of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika set up an ontology containing substances, qualities, actions, relations, generic and particular properties, etc. With this realistic ontology in mind, they argue that if the relation between a word and its artha (“meaning”) were a natural ontological relation, there should be real experiences of burning and cutting in one’s mouth after hearing words like “agni” (“fire”) and “asi” (“sword”). Therefore, this relationship must be a conventional relationship (saṃketa), the convention being established by God as part of his initial acts of creation. The relationship between a word and the object it refers to is thought to be the desire of God that such and such a word should refer to such and such an object. It is through this established conventional relationship that a word reminds the listener of its meaning. The school of Mīmāṃsā represents the tradition of the exegesis of the Vedic texts. However, in the course of discussing and perfecting principles of interpretation, this system developed a full-scale theory of ontology and an important theory of meaning. For the Mīmāṃsakas, the primary tenet is that the Vedic scriptural texts are eternal and uncreated, and that they are meaningful. For this orthodox system, which remarkably defends the scripture but dispenses with the notion of God, the relationship between a word and its meaning is an innate eternal relationship. For both Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas and Mīmāṃsakas, language refers to external states of the world and not just to conceptual constructions.