ABSTRACT

George Berkeley’s general line was similar to John Locke’s—although from the polemics of his attack on Locke one might not guess it— that words are significant if they are used to denote. Whatever Berkeley thought his doctrine of notions came to, he introduced it to clear up an inconsistency or to fill a lacuna which he himself found, and was dissatisfied with, in the first printed versions of the Principles, the Three Dialogues and Alciphron. There is an interesting parallelism with Locke; and one is tempted to wonder whether Berekeley’s terminology of notions was influenced by his familiarity with Locke’s. For Locke a word stands for an idea, and an idea for a thing or a quality of a thing. Berkeley misread Locke on the relation between idea and thing, and Berkeley had his immaterialist account of things which was as different from Locke’s account of things as could be.