  Gassendi also contests the Aristotelian view that we can know universals, on the grounds that we cannot perceive anything more than particulars in the world (O III (Exercitationes) 159a; EP 280-281). It follows, he suggests, that neither can there be any universals we know about, at least with anything like certainty. Some commentators (including Bloch, Rochot, and Osler) propose that nominalism is a central Gassendist view, on the basis of this rejection of essences and universals, as well as his epistemic reliance on the apparent, and interest in signs and their conventional character. But Gassendi's nominalism—if it be such, in the orthodox sense—is intended less as an ontological assessment, than as a statement of the limits of human mental capacity, whether epistemic or linguistic.