 Abelard defends his thesis that universals are nothing but words by arguing that ontological realism about universals is incoherent. More exactly, he holds that there cannot be any real object in the world satisfying Boethius’s criteria for the universal, namely something present as a whole in many at once so as to constitute their substance (i.e. to make the individual in which it is present what it is). Hence, Abelard concludes, universality is not an ontological feature of the world but a semantic feature of language.