Berkeley on Abstraction, Universals, and Universal Knowledge

This chapter includes three claims. The first is that while Berkeley treated the metaphysical problem of universals as unproblematically resolved in favor of nominalism (which he interpreted in an extreme form), he recognized the epistemic problem as a separate issue he needed to engage with and this is the primary positive contribution of his attack on abstraction. The second is that his solution to the epistemic problem is semiotic, but his semantics here is anthropocentric and pragmatic (in contrast to the semantics of visual language). The third is that this semantic theory, while it emphasizes the role of signs and thus has some affinities with formalism, has no special role for formal properties of signs and in fact makes formalism hard to achieve.