But it is beyond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with: every bird and beast men saw; every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding. During the Middle Ages, much of the debate about universals concerned the question whether or not they could be considered to " exist ". ...

Anybody’s search for language universals will depend on certain assumptions that are not themselves scientific in the strict sense of the empirical sciences, since they cannot be subjected to experimental testing. These basic assumptions are ontological, as they imply convictions of how those universals might exist, and they are epistemological because their mode of existence will determine how...

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On the Necessity and Sufficiency of Universals