Did “Ostrich Nominalism” occur late in history?

Question

In his paper “On What There Is” W.V.O. Quine mounted a unique argument against realism of universals:

One may admit that there are red houses, roses, and sunsets, but deny, except as a popular and misleading manner of speaking, that they have anything in common. The words ‘houses’, ‘roses’, and ‘sunsets’ are true of sundry individual entities which are houses and roses and sunsets, and the word ‘red’ or ‘red object’ is true of each of sundry individual entities which are red houses, red roses, red sunsets; but there is not, in addition, any entity whatever, individual or otherwise, which is named by the word ‘redness’, nor, for that matter, by the word ‘househood’, ‘rosehood’, ‘sunsethood’. That the houses and roses and sunsets are all of them red may be taken as ultimate and irreducible, and it may be held that McX is no better off, in point of real explanatory power, for all the occult entities which he posits under such names as ‘redness’.’

David Armstrong coined the pejorative term “Ostrich Nominalism” for Quine's variant of nominalism.

Now, the problem of universals was already formulated at the dawn of philosophy. But Quine was a 20th century philosopher!

Quine's argument is not at all complex, it's as simple as it can be: He just points out that in the “one over many” argument, realists assume they can talk of one entity shared between many numerically different particulars without giving any justification why we should assume such a shared entity in the first place.

Did Quine have any “predecessors” regarding “Ostrich Nominalism”? And if he didn't, can we give any sociocultural explanation why in the whole history of philosophy nobody before found it worthwhile to argue along this line?

Answer 1

Nominalism about universals and much else has a long history in Western philosophy. William of Ockham, c. 1280—c. 1349 (of 'Occam's Razor fame), was clear :

'To conclude, I say that there is no such a thing as a universal, intrinsically present in the things to which it is common'. (In libros Sententiarum [Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard], c. 1318, I, dist. 2, qu. 4.)

As I read this it need mean no more than that the particulars that are grouped under a universal have nothing more in common than the fact that the same (universal) name is applied to them. The particulars are not identified by their properties. They have the same predicate applied to them but this emphatically does not imply that they share a property (not even the property of having the same name applied to them since there is no such property but only another shared predicate). The common name is just a common predicate. There are no properties and there is no property possession. How does this not agree with Quine ?

As for Abelard, Andrew Schoedinger summarises his position as that : 'Universals, then, are neither voces (words) nor res (things). Universal terms are sermones. They imply a judgment about particulars - the judgment that many different particulars have common qualities' (A. Schoedinger, 'The Problem of Universals', NJ : Humanities Press, 1992, 23. 'Qualities' = 'properties' ? How does this put him closer than Ockham to Quine ? Schoedinger's interpretation is based on an extract, too long to quote here, from Abelard taken from JF Wippel & AB Wolter, 'Medieval Philosophy : From St Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa', Free Press, 1969. The pages in Schoedinger are 23-34. Schoedinger may be wrong - or not.