Conceptualism

[2] Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies their presence in particulars outside the mind's perception of them.

[4] The evolution of late scholastic terminology has led to the emergence of conceptualism, which stemmed from doctrines that were previously considered to be nominalistic.

[5] William of Ockham was another famous late medieval thinker who had a strictly conceptualist solution to the metaphysical problem of universals.

Conceptualism was either explicitly or implicitly embraced by most of the early modern thinkers, including René Descartes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, George Berkeley, and David Hume – often in a quite simplified form if compared with the elaborate scholastic theories.

[13] In the context of the arts see: Conceptualisms in Christoph Metzger, Conceputalisms in Musik, Kunst und Film, im Auftrag der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2003 Conceptualist realism (a view put forward by David Wiggins in 1980) states that our conceptual framework maps reality.

[15] McDowell's touchstone is the famous refutation that Wilfrid Sellars provided for what he called the "Myth of the Given"—the notion that all empirical knowledge is based on certain assumed or 'given' items, such as sense data.