Questions tagged [nominalism]
Nominalism is the position that universals and/or abstract objects do not exist
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Why would infinite monkeys not produce the works of Shakespeare?
Apologies if this is a very basic/obvious question. I have no training in philosophy, but have been making my way through Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy podcast.
Recently I listened to his ...
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How many Platonic ideals are there?
Suppose you have an unripe banana that is yellow with a greenish tint. We could say that this banana partially embodies the platonic ideal of yellowness. We could also say that to a lesser degree it ...
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How do we know we've defined a thing properly when all definitions have exceptions? [closed]
I don’t understand definitions.
Let’s take this question: “What is a woman?”
Now if I am a Platonic Idealist (or some other essentialist) then I think that all women share the same essence and will ...
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Does nominalism about kinds/universals entail eliminativism/nihilism about ordinary objects?
If one holds a nominalist or conventionalist view of universals or kind, then do they believe that there are ordinary objects?
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Is metaphysical nominalism essentially eliminativism?
As someone who appreciates William of Occam's eponymous legacy (as I hope most people should, whether they know it by name or not), I was reading more about his life and discovered that his other ...
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Is nominalism generally considered to be disconfirmed?
In Are numbers particulars?, David Gudeman states "nominalist, which I don't think anyone is these days." I was not aware that nominalism regarding universal is generally considered to be ...
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Give something a name and it becomes a thing?
I'm looking for the name of a concept in, I think, philosophy of language, or perhaps rhetoric.
So, a colleague once made a comment something like, "If you give something a name, it becomes a ...
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Do nominalists say that unicorns and married bachelors don't exist in the same way?
I'm a philosophy novice that's trying to wrap my head around nominalism. In my current thinking there is a big difference between two categories of things that don't exist: non-actual concepts and ...
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Why should we care about the Platonism vs. nominalism debate?
I understand the debate to be about whether abstract concepts actually "exist". As such, it is clearly an important question for ontology.
However, I fail to see any practical reason to care ...
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Mathematical nominalists and realists on "there are at least as many possible intentional states as mathematical objects"?
I think this can be meaningfully asked. Intentional states
**Ideally I'm asking this about: mathematical nominalists, constructivists, intuitionists, and realists (and ideally I'd ask this about ...
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Did Gödel think certain math could only be understood if platonism is correct? (and correspondence and nominalism)
I’m reading Shapiro’s Thinking About Mathematics, and there’s a quote by Godel which I would like to fully understand, both his intended meaning and how it’s viewed in the wider context of mathematics,...
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Do realists and nominalists actually disagree about what really is, or do they just disagree about words?
So I am reading Loux's contemporary introduction to metaphysics, and he starts by giving two broad ideas about universals.
Do realists and nominalists actually disagree about what really is? For ...
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Is this a type of nominalism?
Abstract entities do not exist, but their absences from each other, do, concretely. Is that a type of nominalism?
So the numbers five and four do not exist, but four not being five, is a concrete (I ...
user62233
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Is the Problem of Universals still a prominent topic of debate?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes an entry for the Medieval version of the debate of universals, but not for anything contemporary. There's an entry on universals in the Internet ...
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What is the meaning of Principle C'' in Hartry Field's 'Science Without Numbers'?
For Field, the following is 'perfectly obvious', but I would like confirmation that I understand it completely.
Let A be a nominalistically statable assertion.
Let A* be the assertion that results by ...
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Do nominalists predicate everything equivocally?
Do nominalists predicate everything equivocally?
Equivocal predication is when only the name is common between two things, for example: "bark" in tree bark and dog's bark.
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Are "univerals" created? Do they evolve?
I've come across the philosophical debate about "universals" versus "particulars". On the one hand, some believe there are no universals, only particulars (nominalists). On the other hand, there are ...
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Nominalistically Finding Radioactive Half-Life?
In Science Without Numbers by Hartry Field he talks about stating things nominalistically. What seemed obvious to me is "How would you find radioactive half-life without math?". I looked all around ...
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On the universal and preconception in stoic logic: the word "natural" (naturale) from Diog. L., VII, 54
Foreword: as an Italian student, I hope that I will not make many mistakes in translating the lexicon from my native language to English; sometimes this will happen, and so putting the Italian word in ...
user35385
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Realist vs Nominalist views of empirical data
I was recently intrigued by this passage regarding time-series data from The Grammar of Graphics, section 3.2:
Among the many prevailing views of the role of empirical data in
modern science, ...
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Can nominalists believe in their own death?
Can nominalists believe in their own death? You often hear people talk about death as nothing-ness, which suggests a universal nothing. And nominalists say that universals do not exist.
Just trying ...
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If mathematical platonism is true, is mathematics then a discovery?
A perennial meta-mathematical question is whether mathematics is an invention or a discovery.
If mathematical platonism is true, it means that mathematical concepts exist as ideas, and therefore, or ...
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What have been the major achievements in the debate regarding platonism and nominalism?
I have read some of the philosophies on either side of the argument, but lack the historical overview to really get a picture of the main achievements chronologically. I'm taking nominalism to mean ...
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Is nominalism to assert something is only what we call it?
Is the following concise definition of nominalism correct:
Nominalism is to assert something is only what we call it.
?
Or are there problems with it?
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How is nominalism different to universalism?
I wonder how this would be best explained to the public without prior knowledge (such myself).
We have on one side the contradiction between e.g. the general or abstract “(being) yellow” vs “yellow ...
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Nominalist views and contradictions
Given a flavor of nominalism which denies that simple sentences and existential quantifiers referring to mathematical objects are literally true (pretense theory, fictionalism, figuralism, etc.), ...
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Can nominalist logicians reject universals but accept universal statements?
I am aware that Nominalism comes in at least two flavors, one in particular is the denial of universals. Under this paradigm of Nominalsim, is it possible for a mathematician or even a logician to be ...
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