 When Abelard puts forward his claim that universality is only a linguistic phenomenon, so that universals are “nothing more than words,” he raises the objection that unless common names are the names of common items, they will be meaningless, and so his view is no better than that of his teacher Roscelin (who held that universals were mere mouth noises). In reply Abelard clearly draws a distinction between two semantic properties names possess: reference (nominatio), a matter of what the term applies to; and sense (significatio), a matter of what hearing the term brings to mind, or more exactly the informational content (doctrina) of the concept the word is meant to give rise to, a causal notion. A few remarks about each are in order.