I have always been weary about the effects of nominalization on philosophy. I worry that our habit of forging nouns from verbs and adjectives give us little choice but to consider, analyze, and speak of non-entities as if they were things and substances. Might this lead some astray?

With the use of a suffix, a term once used to modify and give information about nouns can become the noun in our grammar, and henceforth, to be treated as one in our thoughts and expressions. Consciousness, happiness, mind, perception, being, life, experience, certainty, will and representation—some of the most perplexing philosophical questions are centered around nominalized terms, and as such, things and substances that do not exist beyond our musings.

It takes a sheer act of will, or might be impossible, to avoid nominalizing terms. It is a natural feature of many languages. But I propose that without at least recognizing a concept’s status as a nominalization beforehand, nominalizing verbs and adjectives may result in a sort of eliminative idealism, where these abstractions become primary to the extant beings they were once used to provide information about.

For example, consider the term “consciousness”, which has littered the expressions of philosophers, neuroscientists, and spiritual gurus alike. Attach the suffix “ness” to the adjective “conscious” and we have created a new element some panpsychists have deemed fundamental to the universe. Fair enough. But perhaps one reason the hard problem of consciousness is difficult is because nominalizations occupy the position and function of a noun in the question itself. Why are the “performances” of bodily functions accompanied by “experience” or “consciousness”? A short answer is: they aren’t. It would be accurate to say “the body experiences” or “the body is conscious”, but I cannot assume the body is accompanied by, or gives rise to, any thing worthy of occupying a noun position and function in the sentence.

These objections might all be pedantry on my part, but should philosophers try to avoid nominalizing verbs and adjectives lest they risk leading others astray?