ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the essentials of abstraction are contained in George Berkeley’s own account of general ideas, and that Berkeley mistakenly thought that he was attacking abstraction as such, when he was at most attacking one version of it. Further, there is no reason to believe that the version which he was attacking was any more central to John Locke’s actual thought than the version which Berkeley himself accepted. Locke has two basic theses about language, first that the primary function of language is to express ideas in the mind of the speaker, and second that the communicative function of language requires the use of general terms. From these premises Locke draws the conclusion that general terms must express general ideas. Indications of a preference on Locke’s part for one or other model are to be found, if at all, in nuances of expression rather than in explicit statement.
