Throughout his mature writings, Berkeley speaks of minds as substances that underlie or support ideas. After initially flirting with a Humean account, according to which minds are nothing but ‘congeries of Perceptions’ (PC 580), Berkeley went on to claim that a mind is a ‘perceiving, active being … entirely distinct’ from its ideas (P 2). Despite his immaterialism, Berkeley retains the traditional category of substance and gives it pride of place in his ontology. Ideas, by contrast, are ‘fleeting and dependent beings’ (P 89) that must be supported by a mental substance. There is no doubt that Berkeley's conception of the relationship between minds and ideas is non-traditional, but that fact does not undercut his commitment to the traditional conception of substance.

Berkeley's Principles is a curious work. The nominal topic is epistemic. The actual topic is ontological. And it is not uncommon to suggest that ‘Berkeley's System presents us with unique puzzles, particularly at its foundation.’

If, as many commentators suggest, Berkeley's principal arguments for idealism are weak, this might suggest that we are approaching his works from a set of assumptions Berkeley did not share. In this paper I explore such a possibility.

Recently, Paul Horwich has developed the minimalist theory of truth, according to which the truth predicate does not express a Substantive property, though it may be used as a grammatical expedient. Minimalism shares these Claims with Quine's disquotationalism; it differs from disquotationalism primarily in holding that truth-bearers are propositions, rather than sentences. Despite potential ontological worries, allowing that propositions bear truth gives Horwich a prima facie response to several important objections to disquotationalism. In section I of this paper, disquotationalism is given a careful exegesis, in which seven known objections are traced to the disquotational Schema, and two new objections are raised. A version of disquotationalism which avoids two of the seven known objections is recommended. In section II, an examination of minimalism shows that it faces eight of the nine objections facing disquotationalism, plus a new objection.

In his 1993 article George Bealer offers three separate arguments that are directed against the internal coherence of empiricism, specifically Quine's version of empiricism. In doing so, Bealer identifies three fundamental principles of Quine's empiricism. First, the principle of empiricism states that:

Second, the principle of holism states that:

Can an effective argument against scepticism about objective values be modelled on Donald Davidson's familiar argument against scepticism about external things?

Davidson evidently thinks so. He has long been on record as maintaining that a theory of interpretation must be ‘unified’ in the sense that it cannot merely solve f or beliefs and meanings but must simultaneously solve for desires as well. And he has made it quite clear that he thinks a theory of interpretation can do this only by subjecting attributions of desires to a ‘principle of charity’ analogous to the principle that he claims must govern attributions of beliefs. Since his argument against external world scepticism is in large part powered by his claim that charity must govern attributions of beliefs, his feeling that charity must likewise govern attributions of desires might appear to commit him to a similar argument against value scepticism.