In addition to the naive view of universals (i.e. universal is what is common to all languages) and the semantic view of universals (i.e. universal is anything that is necessarily common to all languages because of the meaning of the term 'language'), the author proposes the pragmatic view (i.e. universal, relative to a person at a certain time, is anything that any theory of language must attribute to all languages according to that person at that time). It is argued that the former two do not, but the latter may solve some basic problems concerning linguistic universals.