fbpx
Wikipedia

Nominalism

In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels.[1][2] There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universals – things that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things (e.g., strength, humanity). The other version specifically denies the existence of abstract objects – objects that do not exist in space and time.[3]

Most nominalists have held that only physical particulars in space and time are real, and that universals exist only post res, that is, subsequent to particular things.[4] However, some versions of nominalism hold that some particulars are abstract entities (e.g., numbers), while others are concrete entities – entities that do exist in space and time (e.g., pillars, snakes, bananas).

Nominalism is primarily a position on the problem of universals. It is opposed to realist philosophies, such as Platonic realism, which assert that universals do exist over and above particulars, and to the hylomorphic substance theory of Aristotle, which asserts that universals are immanently real within them. However, the name "nominalism" emerged from debates in medieval philosophy with Roscellinus.

The term nominalism stems from the Latin nomen, "name". John Stuart Mill summarised nominalism in the apothegm "there is nothing general except names".[5]

In philosophy of law, nominalism finds its application in what is called constitutional nominalism.[6]

History

Ancient Greek philosophy

Democritus and atomism.

Plato was perhaps the first writer in Western philosophy to clearly state a realist, i.e. non-nominalist, position:

... We customarily hypothesize a single form in connection with each of the many things to which we apply the same name. ... For example, there are many beds and tables. ... But there are only two forms of such furniture, one of the bed and one of the table. (Republic 596a–b, trans. Grube)

What about someone who believes in beautiful things, but doesn't believe in the beautiful itself ...? Don't you think he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state? (Republic 476c)

The Platonic universals corresponding to the names "bed" and "beautiful" were the Form of the Bed and the Form of the Beautiful, or the Bed Itself and the Beautiful Itself. Platonic Forms were the first universals posited as such in philosophy.[7]

Our term "universal" is due to the English translation of Aristotle's technical term katholou which he coined specially for the purpose of discussing the problem of universals.[8] Katholou is a contraction of the phrase kata holou, meaning "on the whole".[9]

Aristotle famously rejected certain aspects of Plato's Theory of Forms, but he clearly rejected nominalism as well:

... 'Man', and indeed every general predicate, signifies not an individual, but some quality, or quantity or relation, or something of that sort. (Sophistical Refutations xxii, 178b37, trans. Pickard-Cambridge)

The first philosophers to explicitly describe nominalist arguments were the Stoics, especially Chrysippus.[10][11]

Medieval philosophy

In medieval philosophy, the French philosopher and theologian Roscellinus (c. 1050 – c. 1125) was an early, prominent proponent of nominalism. Nominalist ideas can be found in the work of Peter Abelard and reached their flowering in William of Ockham, who was the most influential and thorough nominalist. Abelard's and Ockham's version of nominalism is sometimes called conceptualism, which presents itself as a middle way between nominalism and realism, asserting that there is something in common among like individuals, but that it is a concept in the mind, rather than a real entity existing independently of the mind. Ockham argued that only individuals existed and that universals were only mental ways of referring to sets of individuals. "I maintain", he wrote, "that a universal is not something real that exists in a subject ... but that it has a being only as a thought-object in the mind [objectivum in anima]". As a general rule, Ockham argued against assuming any entities that were not necessary for explanations. Accordingly, he wrote, there is no reason to believe that there is an entity called "humanity" that resides inside, say, Socrates, and nothing further is explained by making this claim. This is in accord with the analytical method that has since come to be called Ockham's razor, the principle that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible. Critics argue that conceptualist approaches answer only the psychological question of universals. If the same concept is correctly and non-arbitrarily applied to two individuals, there must be some resemblance or shared property between the two individuals that justifies their falling under the same concept and that is just the metaphysical problem that universals were brought in to address, the starting-point of the whole problem (MacLeod & Rubenstein, 2006, §3d). If resemblances between individuals are asserted, conceptualism becomes moderate realism; if they are denied, it collapses into nominalism.

Modern and contemporary philosophy

In modern philosophy, nominalism was revived by Thomas Hobbes[12] and Pierre Gassendi.[13]

In contemporary analytic philosophy, it has been defended by Rudolf Carnap,[14] Nelson Goodman,[15] H. H. Price,[14] and D. C. Williams.[16]

Lately, some scholars have been questioning what kind of influences nominalism might have had in the conception of modernity and contemporaneity. According to Michael Allen Gilllespie, nominalism profoundly influences these two periods. Even though modernity and contemporaneity are secular eras, their roots are firmly established in the sacred.[17] Furthermore, "Nominalism turned this world on its head," he argues. "For the nominalists, all real being was individual or particular and universals were thus mere fictions."[17]

Another scholar, Victor Bruno, follows the same line. According to Bruno, nominalism is one of the first signs of rupture in the medieval system. "The dismembering of the particulars, the dangerous attribution to individuals to a status of totalization of possibilities in themselves, all this will unfold in an existential fissure that is both objective and material. The result of this fissure fissure will be the essays to establish the nation state."[18]

Indian philosophy

Indian philosophy encompasses various realist and nominalist traditions. Certain orthodox Hindu schools defend the realist position, notably Purva Mimamsa, Nyaya and Vaisheshika, maintaining that the referent of the word is both the individual object perceived by the subject of knowledge and the universal class to which the thing belongs. According to Indian realism, both the individual and the universal exist objectively, with the second underlying the former.

Buddhists take the nominalist position, especially those of the Sautrāntika[19] and Yogācāra schools;[20][18] they were of the opinion that words have as referent not true objects, but only concepts produced in the intellect. These concepts are not real since they do not have efficient existence, that is, causal powers. Words, as linguistic conventions, are useful to thought and discourse, but even so, it should not be accepted that words apprehend reality as it is.

Dignāga formulated a nominalist theory of meaning called apohavada, or theory of exclusions. The theory seeks to explain how it is possible for words to refer to classes of objects even if no such class has an objective existence. Dignāga's thesis is that classes do not refer to positive qualities that their members share in common. On the contrary, universal classes are exclusions (apoha). As such, the "cow" class, for example, is composed of all exclusions common to individual cows: they are all non-horse, non-elephant, etc.

The problem of universals

Nominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals, specifically accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type. For example, Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats, or, the fact that certain properties are repeatable, such as: the grass, the shirt, and Kermit the Frog are green. One wants to know by virtue of what are Fluffy and Kitzler both cats, and what makes the grass, the shirt, and Kermit green.

The Platonist answer is that all the green things are green in virtue of the existence of a universal: a single abstract thing that, in this case, is a part of all the green things. With respect to the color of the grass, the shirt and Kermit, one of their parts is identical. In this respect, the three parts are literally one. Greenness is repeatable because there is one thing that manifests itself wherever there are green things.

Nominalism denies the existence of universals. The motivation for this flows from several concerns, the first one being where they might exist. Plato famously held, on one interpretation, that there is a realm of abstract forms or universals apart from the physical world (see theory of the forms). Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal. But this raises the question: Where is this universal realm? One possibility is that it is outside space and time. A view sympathetic with this possibility holds that, precisely because some form is immanent in several physical objects, it must also transcend each of those physical objects; in this way, the forms are "transcendent" only insofar as they are "immanent" in many physical objects. In other words, immanence implies transcendence; they are not opposed to one another. (Nor, in this view, would there be a separate "world" or "realm" of forms that is distinct from the physical world, thus shirking much of the worry about where to locate a "universal realm".) However, naturalists assert that nothing is outside of space and time. Some Neoplatonists, such as the pagan philosopher Plotinus and the Christian philosopher Augustine, imply (anticipating conceptualism) that universals are contained within the mind of God. To complicate things, what is the nature of the instantiation or exemplification relation?

Conceptualists hold a position intermediate between nominalism and realism, saying that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality.

Moderate realists hold that there is no realm in which universals exist, but rather universals are located in space and time wherever they are manifest. Now, recall that a universal, like greenness, is supposed to be a single thing. Nominalists consider it unusual that there could be a single thing that exists in multiple places simultaneously. The realist maintains that all the instances of greenness are held together by the exemplification relation, but this relation cannot be explained. Additionally, in lexicology as an argument against color realism; there is the subject of blue-green distinction; where in some languages the equivalent words for blue and green may be colexified) (and there may not be a straightforward translation either, in Japanese 青 (usually translated as "blue")); is sometimes used for words which in English may be considered as "green" (such as apples)[21]

Finally, many philosophers prefer simpler ontologies populated with only the bare minimum of types of entities, or as W. V. O. Quine said "They have a taste for 'desert landscapes.'" They try to express everything that they want to explain without using universals such as "catness" or "greenness."

Varieties

There are various forms of nominalism ranging from extreme to almost-realist. One extreme is predicate nominalism, which states that Fluffy and Kitzler, for example, are both cats simply because the predicate 'is a cat' applies to both of them. And this is the case for all similarity of attribute among objects. The main criticism of this view is that it does not provide a sufficient solution to the problem of universals. It fails to provide an account of what makes it the case that a group of things warrant having the same predicate applied to them.[22]

Proponents of resemblance nominalism believe that 'cat' applies to both cats because Fluffy and Kitzler resemble an exemplar cat closely enough to be classed together with it as members of its kind, or that they differ from each other (and other cats) quite less than they differ from other things, and this warrants classing them together.[23] Some resemblance nominalists will concede that the resemblance relation is itself a universal, but is the only universal necessary. Others argue that each resemblance relation is a particular, and is a resemblance relation simply in virtue of its resemblance to other resemblance relations. This generates an infinite regress, but many argue that it is not vicious.[24]

Class nominalism argues that class membership forms the metaphysical backing for property relationships: two particular red balls share a property in that they are both members of classes corresponding to their properties – that of being red and being balls. A version of class nominalism that sees some classes as "natural classes" is held by Anthony Quinton.[25]

Conceptualism is a philosophical theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind.[26] The conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies their presence in particulars outside of the mind's perception of them.[27]

Another form of nominalism is trope nominalism. A trope is a particular instance of a property, like the specific greenness of a shirt. One might argue that there is a primitive, objective resemblance relation that holds among like tropes. Another route is to argue that all apparent tropes are constructed out of more primitive tropes and that the most primitive tropes are the entities of complete physics. Primitive trope resemblance may thus be accounted for in terms of causal indiscernibility. Two tropes are exactly resembling if substituting one for the other would make no difference to the events in which they are taking part. Varying degrees of resemblance at the macro level can be explained by varying degrees of resemblance at the micro level, and micro-level resemblance is explained in terms of something no less robustly physical than causal power. David Armstrong, perhaps the most prominent contemporary realist, argues that such a trope-based variant of nominalism has promise, but holds that it is unable to account for the laws of nature in the way his theory of universals can.[citation needed]

Ian Hacking has also argued that much of what is called social constructionism of science in contemporary times is actually motivated by an unstated nominalist metaphysical view. For this reason, he claims, scientists and constructionists tend to "shout past each other".[28]

Mathematical nominalism

A notion that philosophy, especially ontology and the philosophy of mathematics, should abstain from set theory owes much to the writings of Nelson Goodman (see especially Goodman 1940 and 1977), who argued that concrete and abstract entities having no parts, called individuals, exist. Collections of individuals likewise exist, but two collections having the same individuals are the same collection. Goodman was himself drawing heavily on the work of Stanisław Leśniewski, especially his mereology, which was itself a reaction to the paradoxes associated with Cantorian set theory. Leśniewski denied the existence of the empty set and held that any singleton was identical to the individual inside it. Classes corresponding to what are held to be species or genera are concrete sums of their concrete constituting individuals. For example, the class of philosophers is nothing but the sum of all concrete, individual philosophers.

The principle of extensionality in set theory assures us that any matching pair of curly braces enclosing one or more instances of the same individuals denote the same set. Hence {a, b}, {b, a}, {a, b, a, b} are all the same set. For Goodman and other proponents of mathematical nominalism,[29] {a, b} is also identical to {a, {b} }, {b, {a, b} }, and any combination of matching curly braces and one or more instances of a and b, as long as a and b are names of individuals and not of collections of individuals. Goodman, Richard Milton Martin, and Willard Quine all advocated reasoning about collectivities by means of a theory of virtual sets (see especially Quine 1969), one making possible all elementary operations on sets except that the universe of a quantified variable cannot contain any virtual sets.

In the foundations of mathematics, nominalism has come to mean doing mathematics without assuming that sets in the mathematical sense exist. In practice, this means that quantified variables may range over universes of numbers, points, primitive ordered pairs, and other abstract ontological primitives, but not over sets whose members are such individuals. To date, only a small fraction of the corpus of modern mathematics can be rederived in a nominalistic fashion.

Criticisms

Historical origins of the term

As a category of late medieval thought, the concept of 'nominalism' has been increasingly queried. Traditionally, the fourteenth century has been regarded as the heyday of nominalism, with figures such as John Buridan and William of Ockham viewed as founding figures. However, the concept of 'nominalism' as a movement (generally contrasted with 'realism'), first emerged only in the late fourteenth century,[30] and only gradually became widespread during the fifteenth century.[31] The notion of two distinct ways, a via antiqua, associated with realism, and a via moderna, associated with nominalism, became widespread only in the later fifteenth century – a dispute which eventually dried up in the sixteenth century.[32]

Aware that explicit thinking in terms of a divide between 'nominalism' and 'realism’ emerged only in the fifteenth century, scholars have increasingly questioned whether a fourteenth-century school of nominalism can really be said to have existed. While one might speak of family resemblances between Ockham, Buridan, Marsilius and others, there are also striking differences. More fundamentally, Robert Pasnau has questioned whether any kind of coherent body of thought that could be called 'nominalism' can be discerned in fourteenth century writing.[33] This makes it difficult, it has been argued, to follow the twentieth century narrative which portrayed late scholastic philosophy as a dispute which emerged in the fourteenth century between the via moderna, nominalism, and the via antiqua, realism, with the nominalist ideas of William of Ockham foreshadowing the eventual rejection of scholasticism in the seventeenth century.[32]

Nominalist reconstructions in mathematics

A critique of nominalist reconstructions[clarification needed] in mathematics was undertaken by Burgess (1983) and Burgess and Rosen (1997). Burgess distinguished two types of nominalist reconstructions. Thus, hermeneutic nominalism is the hypothesis that science, properly interpreted, already dispenses with mathematical objects (entities) such as numbers and sets. Meanwhile, revolutionary nominalism is the project of replacing current scientific theories by alternatives dispensing with mathematical objects (see Burgess, 1983, p. 96). A recent study extends the Burgessian critique to three nominalistic reconstructions: the reconstruction of analysis by Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Karl Weierstrass that dispensed with infinitesimals; the constructivist re-reconstruction of Weierstrassian analysis by Errett Bishop that dispensed with the law of excluded middle; and the hermeneutic reconstruction, by Carl Boyer, Judith Grabiner, and others, of Cauchy's foundational contribution to analysis that dispensed with Cauchy's infinitesimals.[34]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ . Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on August 26, 2021.
  2. ^ Mill (1872); Bigelow (1998).
  3. ^ Rodriguez-Pereyra (2008) writes: "The word 'Nominalism', as used by contemporary philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition, is ambiguous. In one sense, its most traditional sense deriving from the Middle Ages, it implies the rejection of universals. In another, more modern but equally entrenched sense, it implies the rejection of abstract objects" (§1).
  4. ^ Feibleman (1962), p. 211.
  5. ^ Mill, J.S. (1865/1877). An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, Volume II, Chapter XVII, p. 50.
  6. ^ An overview of the philosophical problems and an application of the concept to a case of the Supreme Court of the State of California, gives Thomas Kupka, 'Verfassungsnominalismus', in: Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 97 (2011), 44–77, PDF.
  7. ^ Penner (1987), p. 24.
  8. ^ Peters (1967), p. 100.
  9. ^ "katholou" in Harvard's Archimedes Project online version of Liddell & Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon.
  10. ^ John Sellars, Stoicism, Routledge, 2014, pp. 84–85: "[Stoics] have often been presented as the first nominalists, rejecting the existence of universal concepts altogether. ... For Chrysippus there are no universal entities, whether they be conceived as substantial Platonic Forms or in some other manner."
  11. ^ "Chrysippus (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)".
  12. ^ "Thomas Hobbes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)".
  13. ^ "Pierre Gassendi (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)".
  14. ^ a b ""Review of Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals" – ndpr.nd.edu".
  15. ^ ""Nelson Goodman: The Calculus of Individuals in its different versions", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
  16. ^ Donald Cary Williams, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  17. ^ a b Gillespie, Michael Allen (2008). The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226293516.
  18. ^ a b Bruno, Victor (2020). A Imagem Estilhaçada: Breve Ensaio sobre Realismo, Nominalismo e Filosofia. Rio de Janeiro: Editora ViV. ISBN 978-6588972021.
  19. ^ Sonam Thakchoe. Edward N. Zalta (ed.). "The Theory of Two Truths in India". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  20. ^ Chatterjee, A. K. (1975). The Yogācāra Idealism (2d, rev. ed.). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. ISBN 8120803159.
  21. ^ Conlan, Francis (January 2003). "Searching for the semantic boundaries of the Japanese colour term 'AO'". Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. 26 (1): 71–86. doi:10.1075/aral.26.1.06con. Retrieved April 17, 2022.
  22. ^ MacLeod & Rubenstein (2006), §3a.
  23. ^ MacLeod & Rubenstein (2006), §3b.
  24. ^ See, for example, H. H. Price (1953).
  25. ^ Quinton, Anthony (1957). "Properties and Classes". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 58: 33–58. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/58.1.33. JSTOR 4544588.
  26. ^ Strawson, P. F. "Conceptualism." Universals, concepts and qualities: new essays on the meaning of predicates. Ashgate Publishing, 2006.
  27. ^ "Conceptualism." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.
  28. ^ Hacking (1999), pp. 80–84.
  29. ^ Bueno, Otávio, 2013, "Nominalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  30. ^ The classic starting point of nominalism has been the edict issued by Louis XI in 1474 commanding that realism alone (as contained in scholars such as Averroes, Albert the Great, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Bonaventure) be taught at the University of Paris, and ordering that the books of various 'renovating scholars', including Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Buridan and Peter of Ailly be removed. The edict used the word 'nominalist' to describe those students at Paris who 'are not afraid to imitate' the renovators. These students then made a reply to Louis XI, defending nominalism as a movement going back to Ockham, which had been persecuted repeatedly, but which in fact represents the truer philosophy. See Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671, (New York: OUP, 2011), p. 85.
  31. ^ For example, when Jerome of Prague visited the University of Heidelberg in 1406, he described the nominalists as those who deny the reality of universals outside the human mind, and realists as those who affirm that reality. Also, for instance, in a 1425 document from the University of Cologne that draws a distinction between the via of Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and the via of the 'modern masters' John Buridan and Marsilius of Inghen. See Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671, (New York: OUP, 2011), p84.
  32. ^ a b See Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671, (New York: OUP, 2011), p84.
  33. ^ See Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671, (New York: OUP, 2011), p86.
  34. ^ Usadi Katz, Karin; Katz, Mikhail G. (2011). "A Burgessian Critique of Nominalistic Tendencies in Contemporary Mathematics and its Historiography". Foundations of Science. 17: 51–89. arXiv:1104.0375. doi:10.1007/s10699-011-9223-1. S2CID 119250310.

References and further reading

  • Adams, Marilyn McCord. William of Ockham (2 volumes) Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1987.
  • American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000.
  • Borges, Jorge Luis (1960). "De las alegorías a las novelas" in Otras inquisiciones (pg 153–56).
  • Burgess, John (1983). Why I am not a nominalist. Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 24, no. 1, 93–105.
  • Burgess, John & Rosen, Gideon. (1997). A Subject with no Object. Princeton University Press.
  • Courtenay, William J. Adam Wodeham: An Introduction to His Life and Writings, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978.
  • Feibleman, James K. (1962). "Nominalism" in Dictionary of Philosophy, Dagobert D. Runes (ed.). Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, & Co. (link)
  • Goodman, Nelson (1977) The Structure of Appearance, 3rd ed. Kluwer.
  • Hacking, Ian (1999). The Social Construction of What?, Harvard University Press.
  • Karin Usadi Katz and Mikhail G. Katz (2011) A Burgessian Critique of Nominalistic Tendencies in Contemporary Mathematics and its Historiography. Foundations of Science. doi:10.1007/s10699-011-9223-1 See link
  • Mill, J. S., (1872). An Examination of William Hamilton's Philosophy, 4th ed., Chapter XVII.
  • Oberman, Heiko. The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001.
  • Penner, T. (1987). The Ascent from Nominalism, D. Reidel Publishing.
  • Peters, F. (1967). Greek Philosophical Terms, New York University Press.
  • Price, H. H. (1953). "Universals and Resemblance", Ch. 1 of Thinking and Experience, Hutchinson's University Library.
  • Quine, W. V. O. (1961). "On What There is," in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd/ed. N.Y: Harper and Row.
  • Quine, W. V. O. (1969). Set Theory and Its Logic, 2nd ed. Harvard University Press. (Ch. 1 includes the classic treatment of virtual sets and relations, a nominalist alternative to set theory.)
  • Robson, John Adam, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools: The Relation of the "Summa de Ente" to Scholastic Debates at Oxford in the Late Fourteenth Century, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
  • Utz, Richard, "Literary Nominalism." Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Ed. Robert E. Bjork. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Vol. III, p. 1000.
  • Russell, Bertrand (1912). "The World of Universals," in The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press.
  • Williams, D. C. (1953). "On the Elements of Being: I", Review of Metaphysics, vol. 17, pp. 3–18.

External links

nominalism, metaphysics, nominalism, view, that, universals, abstract, objects, actually, exist, other, than, being, merely, names, labels, there, least, main, versions, nominalism, version, denies, existence, universals, things, that, instantiated, exemplifie. In metaphysics nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels 1 2 There are at least two main versions of nominalism One version denies the existence of universals things that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things e g strength humanity The other version specifically denies the existence of abstract objects objects that do not exist in space and time 3 Most nominalists have held that only physical particulars in space and time are real and that universals exist only post res that is subsequent to particular things 4 However some versions of nominalism hold that some particulars are abstract entities e g numbers while others are concrete entities entities that do exist in space and time e g pillars snakes bananas Nominalism is primarily a position on the problem of universals It is opposed to realist philosophies such as Platonic realism which assert that universals do exist over and above particulars and to the hylomorphic substance theory of Aristotle which asserts that universals are immanently real within them However the name nominalism emerged from debates in medieval philosophy with Roscellinus The term nominalism stems from the Latin nomen name John Stuart Mill summarised nominalism in the apothegm there is nothing general except names 5 In philosophy of law nominalism finds its application in what is called constitutional nominalism 6 Contents 1 History 1 1 Ancient Greek philosophy 1 2 Medieval philosophy 1 3 Modern and contemporary philosophy 1 4 Indian philosophy 2 The problem of universals 3 Varieties 3 1 Mathematical nominalism 4 Criticisms 4 1 Historical origins of the term 4 2 Nominalist reconstructions in mathematics 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References and further reading 8 External linksHistory EditSee also Anti realism Ancient Greek philosophy Edit Democritus and atomism Plato was perhaps the first writer in Western philosophy to clearly state a realist i e non nominalist position We customarily hypothesize a single form in connection with each of the many things to which we apply the same name For example there are many beds and tables But there are only two forms of such furniture one of the bed and one of the table Republic 596a b trans Grube What about someone who believes in beautiful things but doesn t believe in the beautiful itself Don t you think he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state Republic 476c The Platonic universals corresponding to the names bed and beautiful were the Form of the Bed and the Form of the Beautiful or the Bed Itself and the Beautiful Itself Platonic Forms were the first universals posited as such in philosophy 7 Our term universal is due to the English translation of Aristotle s technical term katholou which he coined specially for the purpose of discussing the problem of universals 8 Katholou is a contraction of the phrase kata holou meaning on the whole 9 Aristotle famously rejected certain aspects of Plato s Theory of Forms but he clearly rejected nominalism as well Man and indeed every general predicate signifies not an individual but some quality or quantity or relation or something of that sort Sophistical Refutations xxii 178b37 trans Pickard Cambridge The first philosophers to explicitly describe nominalist arguments were the Stoics especially Chrysippus 10 11 Medieval philosophy Edit In medieval philosophy the French philosopher and theologian Roscellinus c 1050 c 1125 was an early prominent proponent of nominalism Nominalist ideas can be found in the work of Peter Abelard and reached their flowering in William of Ockham who was the most influential and thorough nominalist Abelard s and Ockham s version of nominalism is sometimes called conceptualism which presents itself as a middle way between nominalism and realism asserting that there is something in common among like individuals but that it is a concept in the mind rather than a real entity existing independently of the mind Ockham argued that only individuals existed and that universals were only mental ways of referring to sets of individuals I maintain he wrote that a universal is not something real that exists in a subject but that it has a being only as a thought object in the mind objectivum in anima As a general rule Ockham argued against assuming any entities that were not necessary for explanations Accordingly he wrote there is no reason to believe that there is an entity called humanity that resides inside say Socrates and nothing further is explained by making this claim This is in accord with the analytical method that has since come to be called Ockham s razor the principle that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible Critics argue that conceptualist approaches answer only the psychological question of universals If the same concept is correctly and non arbitrarily applied to two individuals there must be some resemblance or shared property between the two individuals that justifies their falling under the same concept and that is just the metaphysical problem that universals were brought in to address the starting point of the whole problem MacLeod amp Rubenstein 2006 3d If resemblances between individuals are asserted conceptualism becomes moderate realism if they are denied it collapses into nominalism Modern and contemporary philosophy Edit In modern philosophy nominalism was revived by Thomas Hobbes 12 and Pierre Gassendi 13 In contemporary analytic philosophy it has been defended by Rudolf Carnap 14 Nelson Goodman 15 H H Price 14 and D C Williams 16 Lately some scholars have been questioning what kind of influences nominalism might have had in the conception of modernity and contemporaneity According to Michael Allen Gilllespie nominalism profoundly influences these two periods Even though modernity and contemporaneity are secular eras their roots are firmly established in the sacred 17 Furthermore Nominalism turned this world on its head he argues For the nominalists all real being was individual or particular and universals were thus mere fictions 17 Another scholar Victor Bruno follows the same line According to Bruno nominalism is one of the first signs of rupture in the medieval system The dismembering of the particulars the dangerous attribution to individuals to a status of totalization of possibilities in themselves all this will unfold in an existential fissure that is both objective and material The result of this fissure fissure will be the essays to establish the nation state 18 Indian philosophy Edit See also Difference philosophy Indian philosophy encompasses various realist and nominalist traditions Certain orthodox Hindu schools defend the realist position notably Purva Mimamsa Nyaya and Vaisheshika maintaining that the referent of the word is both the individual object perceived by the subject of knowledge and the universal class to which the thing belongs According to Indian realism both the individual and the universal exist objectively with the second underlying the former Buddhists take the nominalist position especially those of the Sautrantika 19 and Yogacara schools 20 18 they were of the opinion that words have as referent not true objects but only concepts produced in the intellect These concepts are not real since they do not have efficient existence that is causal powers Words as linguistic conventions are useful to thought and discourse but even so it should not be accepted that words apprehend reality as it is Dignaga formulated a nominalist theory of meaning called apohavada or theory of exclusions The theory seeks to explain how it is possible for words to refer to classes of objects even if no such class has an objective existence Dignaga s thesis is that classes do not refer to positive qualities that their members share in common On the contrary universal classes are exclusions apoha As such the cow class for example is composed of all exclusions common to individual cows they are all non horse non elephant etc The problem of universals EditNominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals specifically accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type For example Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats or the fact that certain properties are repeatable such as the grass the shirt and Kermit the Frog are green One wants to know by virtue of what are Fluffy and Kitzler both cats and what makes the grass the shirt and Kermit green The Platonist answer is that all the green things are green in virtue of the existence of a universal a single abstract thing that in this case is a part of all the green things With respect to the color of the grass the shirt and Kermit one of their parts is identical In this respect the three parts are literally one Greenness is repeatable because there is one thing that manifests itself wherever there are green things Nominalism denies the existence of universals The motivation for this flows from several concerns the first one being where they might exist Plato famously held on one interpretation that there is a realm of abstract forms or universals apart from the physical world see theory of the forms Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal But this raises the question Where is this universal realm One possibility is that it is outside space and time A view sympathetic with this possibility holds that precisely because some form is immanent in several physical objects it must also transcend each of those physical objects in this way the forms are transcendent only insofar as they are immanent in many physical objects In other words immanence implies transcendence they are not opposed to one another Nor in this view would there be a separate world or realm of forms that is distinct from the physical world thus shirking much of the worry about where to locate a universal realm However naturalists assert that nothing is outside of space and time Some Neoplatonists such as the pagan philosopher Plotinus and the Christian philosopher Augustine imply anticipating conceptualism that universals are contained within the mind of God To complicate things what is the nature of the instantiation or exemplification relation Conceptualists hold a position intermediate between nominalism and realism saying that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality Moderate realists hold that there is no realm in which universals exist but rather universals are located in space and time wherever they are manifest Now recall that a universal like greenness is supposed to be a single thing Nominalists consider it unusual that there could be a single thing that exists in multiple places simultaneously The realist maintains that all the instances of greenness are held together by the exemplification relation but this relation cannot be explained Additionally in lexicology as an argument against color realism there is the subject of blue green distinction where in some languages the equivalent words for blue and green may be colexified and there may not be a straightforward translation either in Japanese 青 usually translated as blue is sometimes used for words which in English may be considered as green such as apples 21 Finally many philosophers prefer simpler ontologies populated with only the bare minimum of types of entities or as W V O Quine said They have a taste for desert landscapes They try to express everything that they want to explain without using universals such as catness or greenness Varieties EditThere are various forms of nominalism ranging from extreme to almost realist One extreme is predicate nominalism which states that Fluffy and Kitzler for example are both cats simply because the predicate is a cat applies to both of them And this is the case for all similarity of attribute among objects The main criticism of this view is that it does not provide a sufficient solution to the problem of universals It fails to provide an account of what makes it the case that a group of things warrant having the same predicate applied to them 22 Proponents of resemblance nominalism believe that cat applies to both cats because Fluffy and Kitzler resemble an exemplar cat closely enough to be classed together with it as members of its kind or that they differ from each other and other cats quite less than they differ from other things and this warrants classing them together 23 Some resemblance nominalists will concede that the resemblance relation is itself a universal but is the only universal necessary Others argue that each resemblance relation is a particular and is a resemblance relation simply in virtue of its resemblance to other resemblance relations This generates an infinite regress but many argue that it is not vicious 24 Class nominalism argues that class membership forms the metaphysical backing for property relationships two particular red balls share a property in that they are both members of classes corresponding to their properties that of being red and being balls A version of class nominalism that sees some classes as natural classes is held by Anthony Quinton 25 Conceptualism is a philosophical theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind 26 The conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies their presence in particulars outside of the mind s perception of them 27 Another form of nominalism is trope nominalism A trope is a particular instance of a property like the specific greenness of a shirt One might argue that there is a primitive objective resemblance relation that holds among like tropes Another route is to argue that all apparent tropes are constructed out of more primitive tropes and that the most primitive tropes are the entities of complete physics Primitive trope resemblance may thus be accounted for in terms of causal indiscernibility Two tropes are exactly resembling if substituting one for the other would make no difference to the events in which they are taking part Varying degrees of resemblance at the macro level can be explained by varying degrees of resemblance at the micro level and micro level resemblance is explained in terms of something no less robustly physical than causal power David Armstrong perhaps the most prominent contemporary realist argues that such a trope based variant of nominalism has promise but holds that it is unable to account for the laws of nature in the way his theory of universals can citation needed Ian Hacking has also argued that much of what is called social constructionism of science in contemporary times is actually motivated by an unstated nominalist metaphysical view For this reason he claims scientists and constructionists tend to shout past each other 28 Mathematical nominalism Edit A notion that philosophy especially ontology and the philosophy of mathematics should abstain from set theory owes much to the writings of Nelson Goodman see especially Goodman 1940 and 1977 who argued that concrete and abstract entities having no parts called individuals exist Collections of individuals likewise exist but two collections having the same individuals are the same collection Goodman was himself drawing heavily on the work of Stanislaw Lesniewski especially his mereology which was itself a reaction to the paradoxes associated with Cantorian set theory Lesniewski denied the existence of the empty set and held that any singleton was identical to the individual inside it Classes corresponding to what are held to be species or genera are concrete sums of their concrete constituting individuals For example the class of philosophers is nothing but the sum of all concrete individual philosophers The principle of extensionality in set theory assures us that any matching pair of curly braces enclosing one or more instances of the same individuals denote the same set Hence a b b a a b a b are all the same set For Goodman and other proponents of mathematical nominalism 29 a b is also identical to a b b a b and any combination of matching curly braces and one or more instances of a and b as long as a and b are names of individuals and not of collections of individuals Goodman Richard Milton Martin and Willard Quine all advocated reasoning about collectivities by means of a theory of virtual sets see especially Quine 1969 one making possible all elementary operations on sets except that the universe of a quantified variable cannot contain any virtual sets In the foundations of mathematics nominalism has come to mean doing mathematics without assuming that sets in the mathematical sense exist In practice this means that quantified variables may range over universes of numbers points primitive ordered pairs and other abstract ontological primitives but not over sets whose members are such individuals To date only a small fraction of the corpus of modern mathematics can be rederived in a nominalistic fashion Criticisms EditHistorical origins of the term Edit As a category of late medieval thought the concept of nominalism has been increasingly queried Traditionally the fourteenth century has been regarded as the heyday of nominalism with figures such as John Buridan and William of Ockham viewed as founding figures However the concept of nominalism as a movement generally contrasted with realism first emerged only in the late fourteenth century 30 and only gradually became widespread during the fifteenth century 31 The notion of two distinct ways a via antiqua associated with realism and a via moderna associated with nominalism became widespread only in the later fifteenth century a dispute which eventually dried up in the sixteenth century 32 Aware that explicit thinking in terms of a divide between nominalism and realism emerged only in the fifteenth century scholars have increasingly questioned whether a fourteenth century school of nominalism can really be said to have existed While one might speak of family resemblances between Ockham Buridan Marsilius and others there are also striking differences More fundamentally Robert Pasnau has questioned whether any kind of coherent body of thought that could be called nominalism can be discerned in fourteenth century writing 33 This makes it difficult it has been argued to follow the twentieth century narrative which portrayed late scholastic philosophy as a dispute which emerged in the fourteenth century between the via moderna nominalism and the via antiqua realism with the nominalist ideas of William of Ockham foreshadowing the eventual rejection of scholasticism in the seventeenth century 32 Nominalist reconstructions in mathematics Edit A critique of nominalist reconstructions clarification needed in mathematics was undertaken by Burgess 1983 and Burgess and Rosen 1997 Burgess distinguished two types of nominalist reconstructions Thus hermeneutic nominalism is the hypothesis that science properly interpreted already dispenses with mathematical objects entities such as numbers and sets Meanwhile revolutionary nominalism is the project of replacing current scientific theories by alternatives dispensing with mathematical objects see Burgess 1983 p 96 A recent study extends the Burgessian critique to three nominalistic reconstructions the reconstruction of analysis by Georg Cantor Richard Dedekind and Karl Weierstrass that dispensed with infinitesimals the constructivist re reconstruction of Weierstrassian analysis by Errett Bishop that dispensed with the law of excluded middle and the hermeneutic reconstruction by Carl Boyer Judith Grabiner and others of Cauchy s foundational contribution to analysis that dispensed with Cauchy s infinitesimals 34 See also EditAbstraction Abstract object Conceptualism Concrete philosophy Idea Ideas Have Consequences Linguistic relativity Literary nominalism Object Problem of universals Psychological nominalism Realism philosophy School of Names Substantial form Universal metaphysics William of OckhamNotes Edit nominalism Lexico UK English Dictionary Oxford University Press Archived from the original on August 26 2021 Mill 1872 Bigelow 1998 Rodriguez Pereyra 2008 writes The word Nominalism as used by contemporary philosophers in the Anglo American tradition is ambiguous In one sense its most traditional sense deriving from the Middle Ages it implies the rejection of universals In another more modern but equally entrenched sense it implies the rejection of abstract objects 1 Feibleman 1962 p 211 Mill J S 1865 1877 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton s Philosophy Volume II Chapter XVII p 50 An overview of the philosophical problems and an application of the concept to a case of the Supreme Court of the State of California gives Thomas Kupka Verfassungsnominalismus in Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 97 2011 44 77 PDF Penner 1987 p 24 Peters 1967 p 100 katholou in Harvard s Archimedes Project online version of Liddell amp Scott s A Greek English Lexicon John Sellars Stoicism Routledge 2014 pp 84 85 Stoics have often been presented as the first nominalists rejecting the existence of universal concepts altogether For Chrysippus there are no universal entities whether they be conceived as substantial Platonic Forms or in some other manner Chrysippus Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Thomas Hobbes Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Pierre Gassendi Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a b Review of Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra Resemblance Nominalism A Solution to the Problem of Universals ndpr nd edu Nelson Goodman The Calculus of Individuals in its different versions Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Donald Cary Williams Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a b Gillespie Michael Allen 2008 The Theological Origins of Modernity Chicago University of Chicago Press ISBN 978 0226293516 a b Bruno Victor 2020 A Imagem Estilhacada Breve Ensaio sobre Realismo Nominalismo e Filosofia Rio de Janeiro Editora ViV ISBN 978 6588972021 Sonam Thakchoe Edward N Zalta ed The Theory of Two Truths in India Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Chatterjee A K 1975 The Yogacara Idealism 2d rev ed Delhi Motilal Banarsidass ISBN 8120803159 Conlan Francis January 2003 Searching for the semantic boundaries of the Japanese colour term AO Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 26 1 71 86 doi 10 1075 aral 26 1 06con Retrieved April 17 2022 MacLeod amp Rubenstein 2006 3a MacLeod amp Rubenstein 2006 3b See for example H H Price 1953 Quinton Anthony 1957 Properties and Classes Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 58 33 58 doi 10 1093 aristotelian 58 1 33 JSTOR 4544588 Strawson P F Conceptualism Universals concepts and qualities new essays on the meaning of predicates Ashgate Publishing 2006 Conceptualism The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy Simon Blackburn Oxford University Press 1996 Oxford Reference Online Oxford University Press Hacking 1999 pp 80 84 Bueno Otavio 2013 Nominalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The classic starting point of nominalism has been the edict issued by Louis XI in 1474 commanding that realism alone as contained in scholars such as Averroes Albert the Great Aquinas Duns Scotus and Bonaventure be taught at the University of Paris and ordering that the books of various renovating scholars including Ockham Gregory of Rimini Buridan and Peter of Ailly be removed The edict used the word nominalist to describe those students at Paris who are not afraid to imitate the renovators These students then made a reply to Louis XI defending nominalism as a movement going back to Ockham which had been persecuted repeatedly but which in fact represents the truer philosophy See Robert Pasnau Metaphysical Themes 1274 1671 New York OUP 2011 p 85 For example when Jerome of Prague visited the University of Heidelberg in 1406 he described the nominalists as those who deny the reality of universals outside the human mind and realists as those who affirm that reality Also for instance in a 1425 document from the University of Cologne that draws a distinction between the via of Thomas Aquinas Albert the Great and the via of the modern masters John Buridan and Marsilius of Inghen See Robert Pasnau Metaphysical Themes 1274 1671 New York OUP 2011 p84 a b See Robert Pasnau Metaphysical Themes 1274 1671 New York OUP 2011 p84 See Robert Pasnau Metaphysical Themes 1274 1671 New York OUP 2011 p86 Usadi Katz Karin Katz Mikhail G 2011 A Burgessian Critique of Nominalistic Tendencies in Contemporary Mathematics and its Historiography Foundations of Science 17 51 89 arXiv 1104 0375 doi 10 1007 s10699 011 9223 1 S2CID 119250310 References and further reading EditAdams Marilyn McCord William of Ockham 2 volumes Notre Dame IN Notre Dame University Press 1987 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Fourth Edition 2000 Borges Jorge Luis 1960 De las alegorias a las novelas in Otras inquisiciones pg 153 56 Burgess John 1983 Why I am not a nominalist Notre Dame J Formal Logic 24 no 1 93 105 Burgess John amp Rosen Gideon 1997 A Subject with no Object Princeton University Press Courtenay William J Adam Wodeham An Introduction to His Life and Writings Leiden E J Brill 1978 Feibleman James K 1962 Nominalism in Dictionary of Philosophy Dagobert D Runes ed Totowa NJ Littlefield Adams amp Co link Goodman Nelson 1977 The Structure of Appearance 3rd ed Kluwer Hacking Ian 1999 The Social Construction of What Harvard University Press Karin Usadi Katz and Mikhail G Katz 2011 A Burgessian Critique of Nominalistic Tendencies in Contemporary Mathematics and its Historiography Foundations of Science doi 10 1007 s10699 011 9223 1 See link Mill J S 1872 An Examination of William Hamilton s Philosophy 4th ed Chapter XVII Oberman Heiko The Harvest of Medieval Theology Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism Grand Rapids MI Baker Academic 2001 Penner T 1987 The Ascent from Nominalism D Reidel Publishing Peters F 1967 Greek Philosophical Terms New York University Press Price H H 1953 Universals and Resemblance Ch 1 of Thinking and Experience Hutchinson s University Library Quine W V O 1961 On What There is in From a Logical Point of View 2nd ed N Y Harper and Row Quine W V O 1969 Set Theory and Its Logic 2nd ed Harvard University Press Ch 1 includes the classic treatment of virtual sets and relations a nominalist alternative to set theory Robson John Adam Wyclif and the Oxford Schools The Relation of the Summa de Ente to Scholastic Debates at Oxford in the Late Fourteenth Century Cambridge England Cambridge University Press 1961 Utz Richard Literary Nominalism Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages Ed Robert E Bjork Oxford Oxford University Press 2010 Vol III p 1000 Russell Bertrand 1912 The World of Universals in The Problems of Philosophy Oxford University Press Williams D C 1953 On the Elements of Being I Review of Metaphysics vol 17 pp 3 18 External links Edit Wikisource has the text of the 1905 New International Encyclopedia article Nominalism Rodriguez Pereyra Gonzalo Nominalism in Metaphysics In Zalta Edward N ed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Maurin Anna Sofia Tropes In Zalta Edward N ed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Universals entry by Mary C MacLeod and Eric M Rubenstein in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Klima Gyula The Medieval Problem of Universals In Zalta Edward N ed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Nominalism Realism Conceptualism from The Catholic Encyclopedia Rosen Burgess Nominalism Reconsidered in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic 2007 Medieval Nominalism and the Literary Questions Selected Studies by Richard Utz with the assistance of Terry Barakat Perspicuitas 2004 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Nominalism amp oldid 1144851350 Varieties, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.