Page 54 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
hold a species, like the tiger, to be a set or class of individual animals (or, more sophisticatedly, a func- tion assigning to each possible world a set of indi- vidual animals existing in that world). Others regard the species itself as a sprawling, scattered individual of which individual tigers are constituent parts or
members, while yet others hold it to be a universal wholly present in each of its individual instances.
Bibliography
Schwartz S P (ed.) 1977 Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Strictly interpreted, nominalism is an ontological the- ory according to which reality is composed entirely and exclusively of particular items. It entails a denial, that is, of the existence of any intrinsically non- particular or general entities—for example, proper- ties, relations, species, universals, types, or common characteristics. The mistaken belief that there are such things as these is then diagnosed as resulting from a misconstruction of the way in which common names and general terms function.
1. StrongandWeakVersions
On the most austere version of this view, for example, there is nothing whatsoever that all trees (or chisels, or red things) have in common—except for the fact that the term tree (or chisel, or red) is applied to them. Few philosophers have embraced so extreme a view— though Thomas Hobbes came close:
'every [common name], though one name, is nevertheless the name of diverse particular things; in respect of all of which together it is called a universal; there being nothing in the world universal but names, for the things named are every one of them individual and singular1
(Hobbes 165 l:ch. IV)
Less strictly interpreted, nominalism is the name of a tendency, in the sense that a theory is nominalistic to the extent that it successfully restricts assignment of explanatory role to things that are either concrete, or individual, or both. Nominalism, in other words, requires at the very least that one eschew reference either: (a) to abstract objects like sets, numbers, prop- ositions, facts, and truth-values, or (b) to nonpar- ticular, 'predicative' entities like properties, relations, functions, and universals.
2. Issues RelatingtoNominalism
As this last claim indicates, however, there are in fact two quite separate issues to be considered here.
2.1 Universals
The first has its origins in ancient debates concerning universals and particulars, the one and the many. In this connection there arise the ontological, logical, linguistic, and epistemological problems to do with the distinction between single, individual items, on the one hand, and, on the other, the shareable attributes or general characteristics they have in common. Nom- inalism of this sort first emerged in the thought of Roscelin, Abelard, and Williamof Ockham as a rejec- tion of the Platonic doctrine that universals enjoy real, objective existence. The impetus towards nominalism of this kind has a number of sources. One is perhaps a straightforward ontological intuition, to the effect that reality just is particular, and that there is some- thing fishy about the very idea of a general or universal entity. Many nominalists were motivated, for instance, by their failure to see how a universal could be simultaneously and wholly present in a number of different objects, without becoming divided in the process. Another historically important impetus came with the emergence in the Middle Ages of radical empiricism; for if all knowledge and understanding originates in sensory experience, and if such experi- ence only ever provides data that are irreducibly par- ticular, then the claim that we possess any knowledge or understanding of things that are nonparticular can appear highly problematic. Finally, for those who accept the desirability of ontological parsimony—as formulated for instance in the principle known as Ockham's Razor ('entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity')—there is a requirement that universals be dispensed with, if this can be done
coherently.
2.2 Abstract Objects
The second issue associated with the topic of nom- inalism has a shorter history than the first, having re-
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Nominalism
D. Bell