 Pearce has also located Arnauld’s account of ideas in the wider context of early modern philosophy. He classifies accounts of ideas as descriptivist or explanatory. In the explanatory approach, “ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory theory” (Pearce forthcoming, p. 2). Malebranche is the paradigm practitioner of the explanatory approach. In the descriptivist approach, by contrast, “claims about ideas are to be justified only by direct introspection, and not by inference to the best explanation” (Pearce, forthcoming, p. 9). Arnauld is the chief practitioner of the descriptivist approach. He not only rejects Malebranche’s attempt to explain how the mind perceives external objects, but he also maintains that no such explanation is needed. For I know clearly by introspection that my nature is to think, and that thinking is representational. As Arnauld puts it, “Just as it is clear that I think, it is also clear that I think of something, i.e., that I perceive and know something” (quoted by Pearce from Ideas in Pearce, forthcoming, p. 8). It is similarly clear what it is that I think of, perceive or know, and in particular it is clear that I think of, perceive or know extended things. Pearce argues that Locke follows Arnauld in his descriptivism, although not in his direct realism (Pearce, forthcoming, p. 10). Berkeley too adopted the descriptivist approach, a fact which helps to explain the absence of arguments for Berkeley’s view that we cannot form abstract general  ideas.[7]