Berkeley and the doctrine of signs

The Role of Visual Language in Berkeley’s Account of Generality1

“…Kenneth Winkler's (2005) has a claim, by its appearance in the Cambridge Companion to Berkeley but especially on its merits, to be regarded as the standard account of Berkeley's view of signs. It begins where Berkeley must have: with the distinction (in the Draft Introduction) between names, whose relationship to what they represent is entirely arbitrary (130), and ideas, which can represent only what they resemble (134).…”

“…A further problem with making linguistic generality basic is that Berkeley appears to take arbitrariness as the defining feature of language (cf. Winkler (1989), 15-6). If ''arbitrariness'' is taken to mean the total absence of rationale or harmony, then the assignment of ideas to sorts by the mind cannot be explained in terms of the ideas' relation to a word.…”

“…Others have argued that whether or not Berkeley held that the impossible cannot be conceived, or that the abstract and general cannot exist separately, he could show that the abstractionists themselves held these views. Flage (1986), Ott (2004), Weinberg (1965), and Winkler (1989) take Berkeley to argue from the widely conceded impossibility of separate qualities or genera to their inconceivability. 6 To accommodate Berkeley's strategic aims, Doney (1983), Atherton ((1987), 66-7), and Wilson ((1999), 260) take him to attack the doctrine of abstract ideas on purely psychological grounds.…”

Shear vibration modes of granular structures: Continuous and discrete approaches

“…Massoumi et al. [31] investigated the free vibrations of simply supported discrete granular beam resting on Winkler elastic foundations (Winkler [56]) by using discrete Bresse–Timoshenko model and calculated explicitly the two branches of natural frequencies. The wave dispersion of granular chain for the two spectra were discussed by Massoumi et al.…”