 Abelard concludes that universality is merely linguistic, not a feature of the world. More precisely, Abelard holds that common nouns (such as ‘animal’), verbs, and negative names (such as ‘not-Socrates’) are correctly predicable of many, and so count as universals. These terms are semantically general, in that their sense applies to more than one thing, but they do not thereby name some general thing; instead, they distributively refer to each of the individuals to which the term applies. For example, the term ‘animal’ has the sense living substance, which is inherently general, and it refers to each individual animal since each is a living substance—as Abelard puts it, since each has the status of being a living substance. But this is to leave the domain of metaphysics for semantics; see the discussion of Abelard‘s philosophy of language in  Section 4.