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Are the particulars not as worthy of being loved, admired, or understood as the abstractions and universals the realist holds dear?

I'm not sure if this makes much sense as a critique. A lot of realism is extremely person centered and sees a strong telos at work in history (the history of particulars). Valuing particulars is not really what is at stake.

Actually, I think some realists attack nominalists precisely for destroying particulars and turning them into a formless "will soup." Note that personalism and phenomenology seems to be biggest in traditional Christian philosophy, which tends to be unrelentingly realist.

I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of those who see realism as a threat, and we can continue this ancient battle on an even footing.

While there are strong similarities between anti-nominalist critiques from a variety of Eastern and Western sources, I think nominalist critiques of realism will be more diverse because nominalism tends towards greater plurality (for better or worse). There are simply skeptical critiques ("you cannot know that because you cannot know the noumenal,") and there are critiques rooted in a view of freedom primarily has power/potency ("your ideas are keeping you from realizing maximal freedom"). The critique of an eliminitive materialist is going to be different from that or a Nietzschean, which will be different from that of a skeptical liberal, etc.



Ockham is singled out by lots of people, it's a bit of a trope. But it's really the voluntarism that's more important. Arguably, the nominalism is just a means to his voluntarism.

But it's not like all realism comes from the angel of intellectualism. Some seek to find a unity of intellect and will above all distinctions (more common in the East because the "nous" and "heart" do not map neatly to intellect/will e.g. Palamas, but even for Aquinas the distinction of will and intellect in God is purely conceptual, not real, while in Eckhart there is the "darkness above the light" beyond all distinctions as "Unground"). Yet these will tend towards volanturism being "more wrong, particularly as respects man. Or, in the Philokalic tradition, we might even say that volanturism is the state of the sick soul, the presence of the diabolical, linear reason.

I don't think these critiques are totally off-base, although Ockham and Scotus might be bad targets. The later anthropology that comes to dominate modern thought in thinkers like Hume, and its conception of reason in particular, is very close to the description of the mind in the condition of sin/under demonic influence in writers like Evagrius. So they are diametrically opposed in a fairly strong sense. But I think people tend to confuse "moral opprobrium" with a more "philosophical opprobrium" here.

I'm not sure if this makes much sense as a critique. A lot of realism is extremely person centered and sees a strong telos at work in history (the history of particulars). Valuing particulars is not really what is at stake.

Actually, I think some realists attack nominalists precisely for destroying particulars and turning them into a formless "will soup." Note that personalism and phenomenology seems to be biggest in traditional Christian philosophy, which tends to be unrelentingly realist.

Then why in your opinion would Pierce describe nominalism as “the dreary outlook upon a world in which all that can be loved, or admired, or understood is figment”, when the figments in question are universals and abstractions? What is it about the world that changes for the realist without universals and abstractions and forms?

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Does it? They certainly exist as ideas.

Ideas are often considered abstract objects.

And this of course exactly not Ockham's idea (as I understand it).

Interesting topic, but could you clarify just what the - your - question is?

People sometimes lay the blame for the state of the world at the feet of some philosopher and his philosophy, as I tried to show. Though I think this is erroneous, metaphysics ought to inform one’s politics, ethics, and so on. If nominalism or realism informs the way one treats others and the world, which is the greater threat to others and the world?

I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of those who see realism as a threat, and we can continue this ancient battle on an even footing. — NOS4A2

The realism you're referencing is really a type of idealism, right? It holds that platonic objects exist in some sense. Peirce is saying that a universe without ideas is a dead universe where nothing matters. It's a universe that can't break your heart because it's just swirling dust.

The reason Peirce is wrong to say that nominalism is a threat has to do with the way the psyche works. Morality is inextricably tied to the forces that give rise to identity. With everyone you meet, you're consciously or subconsciously assessing who they are relative to you, and they provide the stimulus from which you gather up who you are, what you want, what you need. This activity develops out of innate capabilities, so most people don't have any choice but to be practical idealists, no matter what their philosophies may be.

I think the exception to this is psychopaths. Though they tend to be highly intelligent, they can't make sense of what everyone else refers to as an "inner world." They can't explain their actions, as if they don't have enough of a sense of self to conceive of motive. Everyone else may see motives in their actions, for instance the crazy guy who buries women's heads in his backyard, each one facing his bedroom, appears to want women to see him in bed. But he can't answer the question: why did you do that? He lives in an entirely nominalist world. But there's no point in worrying about his philosophy, because it's being driven by underlying hardware problems. The only hope for him is death.

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I think there is a fact of the matter, that is, is nominalism true or not? If we only distinguished particulars, we would never develop a concept, no matter how many interactions with objects you'd have.

But what's the threat of realism? There is a world out there, and we try to make sense of it. That someone believes in universals is not a threat against realism. It only implies that we understand things better through universals than particulars.

The only danger from realism I can think of that is any way a "problem" would be a denial of a mind-independent world. If that's true, then we are all idealists' way beyond anything Berkely could have imagined.

But even were that to be true, what's the problem?

Oddly enough Berkeley is considered a nominalist.

For nominalism abstract terms and generalities are useful fictions, namely, “names” (hence the word nominalism). In that respect they serve a useful purpose.

But if someone kills another for some the sake of some name like “country” or “God”, then we have an instance of destroying what is boundlessly more valuable for the sake of an idea or figment. This, I fear, is the threat of realism.

But if someone kills another for some the sake of some name like “country” or “God”, then we have an instance of destroying what is boundlessly more valuable for the sake of an idea or figment.

Kills another what exactly? :wink:

@tim wood mentions the book The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie, which I read just as I started posting on forums, around 2010. It is a very insightful book. The subject really is the geneology of modernity - where 'geneology' means the development over time of the deep assumptions and understandings that underlie modern thought and philosophy.

'Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which, according to Gillespie, dismantled the rational God and Cosmos of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, born out of a concern that anything less than this would jeopardize His divine omnipotence. Subsequent intellectual history is, in Gillespie's reading, a grappling with the question of free will and determinism. Protestantism becomes fideistic ('salvation by faith alone'), and denies free will in order to preserve God's absolute power (illustrated by Calvin's doctrine of predestination). However, this in turn culminated in an ambivalence about salvation: if God simply wills whom to save, human action can have no real merit. Gillespie's chapter on the debate between Erasmus-Luther was among the most interesting in bringing this out' ~ from a review.

… the apparent rejection or disappearance of religion and theology in fact conceals the continuing relevance of theological issues and commitments for the modern age. Viewed from this perspective, the process of secularization or disenchantment that has come to be seen as identical with modernity was in fact something different than it seemed: not the crushing victory of reason over infamy, to use Voltaire’s famous term, not the long drawn out death of God that Nietzsche proclaimed, and not the evermore distant withdrawal of the deus absconditus Heidegger points to, but the gradual transference of divine attributes to human beings (an infinite human will), the natural world (universal mechanical causality), social forces (the general will, the hidden hand), and history (the idea of progress, dialectical development, the cunning of reason). ...

That the de-emphasis, disappearance, and death of God should bring about a change in our understanding of man and nature is hardly surprising. Modernity … originates out of a series of attempts to construct a coherent metaphysic specialis on a nominalist foundation, to reconstitute something like the comprehensive summalogical account of scholastic realism. The successful completion of this project was rendered problematic by the real ontological differences between an infinite (and radically omnipotent) God and his finite creation (including both man and nature).

---

Nominalism and all its ways are devices of the Devil if devil there be. And in particular it is the disease which almost drove poor John Mill mad,—the dreary outlook upon a world in which all that can be loved, or admired, or understood is figment.

— Charles Sanders Peirce, "Semiotic and significs : the correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby"

Compare with:

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence. — Ideas have Consequences, Richard Weaver

(That book, by the way, is on a similar theme to Gillespie's. Weaver was a professor of English at Chicago, and published his book in the 1950s, since when it has become a staple of American intellectual conservatism (which is unfortunate in my view.))

My interpretation of this issue, and why it is important, is that this is how scientific materialism comes to be such a dominant force in modern western culture. Why? Because in the absence of universals, the nature of being can only be understood in terms of particulars, and universal concepts reduced to the psychological or social.

Oddly enough Berkeley is considered a nominalist. — NOS4A2

As indeed he was, and it is one of the major shortcomings of his otherwise ingenious philosophy. His circumlocutions on 'general ideas' are the weakest point of his writing - something which C S Peirce also commented on.

From a nominalist perspective, the realist project presents a different individualism, an extreme egoism, where figment is “all that can be loved, or admired, or understood”. — NOS4A2

Interesting OP, but I don't follow this sentence at all. Peirce is not saying that figment is all that can be loved...? (Edit: So is it the idea that realists are interested in abstractions apart from particulars? That seems a strange construal.)

Do you have a response from a bona fide nominalist, such as Peirce was critiquing? I'm not convinced that such nominalists would agree with you, and it would be interesting to see their response.

It mostly seems like Peirce's critique is not being understood. On your view what does the nominalist say can, or should, be loved?

Kills another what exactly? :wink: — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice. :clap:

Peirce’s visceral reaction highlights how deeply realism is tied to meaning-making for some, without universals, the world can seem empty or arbitrary. But from the nominalist camp, that same insistence on universals can look like projection or even imperialism of the mind over experience.

Critics of nominalism like Dugin and Benoist do often connect it to the unraveling of traditional identities, but as you point out, that assumes the legitimacy of those categories in the first place. From a nominalist view, those identities are constructed and contingent, not essential truths. So if realism can support oppressive structures by making them seem eternal or “natural,” then yes, it has its own dangers.

For a strong case against realism, Richard Rorty comes to mind, he didn’t see truth as correspondence to universals but as what works in conversation. His pragmatism was deeply nominalist. You might also check out Nelson Goodman, especially in Ways of Worldmaking, where he questions whether there even is a singular “world” apart from the symbols we use to carve it up

Critics of nominalism like Dugin and Benoist do often connect it to the unraveling of traditional identities, but as you point out, that assumes the legitimacy of those categories in the first place. From a nominalist view, those identities are constructed and contingent, not essential truths. — Areeb Salim

Are there any? Or is truth always a mental construct?

Do you have a response from a bona fide nominalist, such as Peirce was critiquing? I'm not convinced that such nominalists would agree with you, and it would be interesting to see their response. — Leontiskos

For example, we could take Richard Joyce's moral fictionalism as an example:

Joyce starts out from the assumption that, when taken literally, moral sentences are systematically untrue, and seeks to show that it can still be practically useful to pretend that it is not so.

[...]

Turning to moral fictionalism, Joyce thinks that the make-believe that moral properties are instantiated can have the same benefits as the genuine belief that they are. — Fictionalism | SEP

It seems that Joyce would agree with Peirce that all that can be loved is a figment, and yet would say that we should love the figment all the same. Note how closely this resembles the position atheists in the What is Faith thread are opposing,* namely the position that emotional or wishful reasons are sufficient for justifying intellectual assent. Joyce is literally advising that we engage in pretend and make-believe for pragmatic reasons, and this is an example of a moral nominalism.

I'm not sure the moral angle is the best angle for evaluating Peirce's quote, but that's where the thread has inevitably gone.

I would agree that caricatures of realism are false. And of course caricatures of nominalism are also false. But realism really shines when we move beyond caricatures and examine the actual positions of nominalists like Joyce.


* Despite the fact that no one in that thread has proposed such a position.

Thanks for all the writing, it was a good and interesting read.

you're welcome. Recommend the book if you can get hold of a copy.

Thank you, that’s a good analysis.

According to Pierce, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Leibniz were all nominalist as well. Despite all these proponents I cannot see it being a dominant view, or having shaped any future, simply because regular folk or those in power appeal to more realist sentiment.

Interesting OP, but I don't follow this sentence at all. Peirce is not saying that figment is all that can be loved...? (Edit: So is it the idea that realists are interested in abstractions apart from particulars? That seems a strange construal.)

I’m wondering if that is the case. Why else would a nominalist outlook lead him to view it as a “dreary outlook”? Or “the most blinding of all systems”? Further, he say it as fundamental to the modern mind.

Kills another what exactly?

Another human being.

But if someone kills another for some the sake of some name like “country” or “God”, then we have an instance of destroying what is boundlessly more valuable for the sake of an idea or figment. This, I fear, is the threat of realism. — NOS4A2

Umm... so this is behind your reasoning in that a metaphysical stance, nominalism or realism, can be a threat?

If nominalism rejects universals and the abstract and thinks these are just mental constructs, then to the above example it doesn't at all matter. The metaphysical question is hardly relevant: if "country" or "God" are either "abstract entities" or if they are "mental constructs" doesn't matter at all to the actions of someone taking a life of another person.

If you start with nominalism, then issue "good" or "bad", "legal" or "illegal" or things like "justified defense" are also simply mental constructs, but apparently very important ones for our society to function. It doesn't somehow lower or give more credibility to the action, if ones metaphysical view is nominalism or realism.

The stance of there existing universals and abstract entities doesn't create anything more to the issue. Metaphysics doesn't answer moral or social questions.

Ideas are often considered abstract objects. — NOS4A2

Yet we can talk about particular ideas. It always seems to me that the best answers lie somewhere in the middle of two extremes - realism and nominalism, rationalism and empiricism, direct and indirect realism, political left and right, etc.

It seems to me that both can be true depending on what goal one has at the moment. What we focus on (the particulars or the universal) at any moment is dependent upon what goal we are trying to accomplish.

Universals are particulars of larger categories of universals.

Are similarity and difference particulars or universals?

What makes something a "human being?" "Usefulness?" The judgements of some "language community?" Real life caricatures like H.P. Lovecraft seemed to doubt that the "gibbering French-Canadians," the residue of the Acadians, the Portuguese, the Welsh, etc. were truly possessed of the same humanity embodied by "good New England stock." More to the point, I have seen people here and elsewhere argue that, not only should elective abortion be legal, and not only is it completely unproblematic, but that this is in part because, prior to passage through the birth canal, the entity in question "is not human."

Humanity, it seems, can be defined many ways. It can even be defined in such a way that no dignity attaches to the term, such that we shouldn't be any more concerned about killing inconvenient humans than we would inconvenient rodents. So, in virtue of what is the sort of definition you're looking for, one that says 'killing men is wrong,' more accurate vis-á-vis our term "man?"

If Lovecraft was wrong, what was he wrong about? He can hardly have been wrong about his own concept of "man."

Simply that he looks like other human beings. We’ve come across enough individual human beings, including ourselves, to develop a general idea of what one is and what one is not. One thing is for certain, we are not developing these general ideas by looking at forms and essences.

The notion that one attaches and removes dignity to terms and definitions in order to dignify a human being is precisely the threat that I’m talking about. When one dehumanizes, like calling people rats for example, nothing at all changes in any individual human being outside the realist skull, but his treatment of them certainly does.

Lovecraft’s mistake was to develop stereotypes from the cognitive process sociologists call “social categorization” and to apply them to flesh-and-blood individuals he has never yet met and could know nothing about.

The stance of there existing universals and abstract entities doesn't create anything more to the issue. Metaphysics doesn't answer moral or social questions.

Sure it does. One’s metaphysics ought to inform how he approaches the other branches of philosophy, including politics and ethics. If one believes the word “society” is just a general name he’s not going to spend a serious amount of time trying to change it.

Simply that he looks like other human beings.

If something "looks like a human being" we should treat it with dignity because...?

One thing is for certain, we are not developing these general ideas by looking at forms and essences.

"Nominalism is true because realism is certainly false." Good one.

The notion that one attaches and removes dignity to terms and definitions in order to dignify a human being is precisely the threat that I’m talking about. When one dehumanizes, like calling people rats for example, nothing at all changes in any individual human being outside the realist skull, but his treatment of them certainly does.

Surely if that's the threat then people's treatment of each other must have improved markedly after 1500, when nominalism became ascendent. More nominalist Protestant nations like the US must have treated minorities better, and the Soviet Union and communist China must have been particular exemplars of upright behavior. In terms of the volanturism that tends to accompany nominalism, I am aware of a society called "the Third Reich" that vastly prioritized the will, which should have resolved the problems of intellectualism in ethics. Let me just flip to my history book to confirm this...

If something "looks like a human being" we should treat it with dignity because...?

No, the fact that something looks like a human being makes something a "human being". It means that everything we know about human beings is derived from the senses and experience.

"Nominalism is true because realism is certainly false." Good one.

Good one. I never said that so the quotes are a little unnecessary.

It's more like "realism is false because no one can find universal or abstract object". One of the common objections from nominalism against realism is that forms and universals and abstract objects cannot be found.

Surely if that's the threat then people's treatment of each other must have improved markedly after 1500, when nominalism became ascendent. More nominalist Protestant nations like the US must have treated minorities better, and the Soviet Union and communist China must have been particular exemplars of upright behavior. In terms of the volanturism that tends to accompany nominalism, I am aware of a society called "the Third Reich" that vastly prioritized the will, which should have resolved the problems of intellectualism in ethics. Let me just flip to my history book to confirm this...

There has never been a nominalist, or rather, individualist country. America is close, I suppose, and has advanced beyond its collectivist ways in the treatments of groups and their memberships, but it still has a long way to go.

One’s metaphysics ought to inform how he approaches the other branches of philosophy, including politics and ethics. — NOS4A2

I disagree.

Politics and ethics as other moral issues are very important irrelevant of them being either our mental constructs or them being something independent of us. What we do, the actions, are important. The reasons why we do something only explain our actions, but the actions themselves are the important issue here.

If one believes the word “society” is just a general name he’s not going to spend a serious amount of time trying to change it. — NOS4A2

Now I don't follow your logic at all. Society is a word and we give words / names for complex things like society.

There has never been a nominalist, or rather, individualist country. America is close, I suppose, and has advanced beyond its collectivist ways in the treatments of groups and their memberships, but it still has a long way to go. — NOS4A2

Nominalism and individualism aren't synonyms. And here individualism or collectivism aren't metaphysical questions.

I disagree.

Politics and ethics as other moral issues are very important irrelevant of them being either our mental constructs or them being something independent of us. What we do, the actions, are important. The reasons why we do something only explain our actions, but the actions themselves are the important issue here.

Actions are important. But do you not act according to any principle?

Now I don't follow your logic at all. Society is a word and we give words / names for complex things like society.

Society is not a thing, though, complex or otherwise. It's just a name for a concept.

Nominalism and individualism aren't synonyms. And here individualism or collectivism aren't metaphysical questions.

One informs the other. Again, if one doesn't believe in groups he's not going to advocate for this or that group's interests, or at least he ought not to.

Well, a country is quite a complex idea. It's not something that is easily pointed to in the way a rock or a river can be pointed to.