  Whether Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke were representationalists of this kind is a matter of some controversy (see e.g. Yolton 1984, Chappell 1994). However, Berkeley surely had good grounds for understanding his predecessors in this way: it reflects the most obvious interpretation of Locke’s account of perception and Descartes’ whole procedure in the Meditations tends to suggest this sort of view, given the meditator’s situation as someone contemplating her own ideas, trying to determine whether something external corresponds to them.