(Changed title to distinguish it from Natural Propositions thread and to match my previously renamed posts)
> On Oct 1, 2014, at 4:00 AM, John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za> wrote: > The more contemporary nominalism is based in a view of language and thought > (which is understood on a linguistic model), and pays special attention to > what we can sense. Quine, for example, calls himself a physicalist because he > believes that our knowledge comes from the senses, which are physical (as a > pragmatist, he shares this with Peirce, except Peirce regards them as > external, not physical, but that might be only a difference in terminology). > Quine and Goodman believe that there are no propositions, only instances of > sentences or statements, and these are related not by identity of some sort > (being of the identical kind) but just by being similar. Although with Quine it gets even trickier given how he views quantifiers. I’d say that in many ways he’s not a nominalist because he seems to accept non-mental mathematical entities. Your point about deflationary theories with regards to propositions is interesting and well made though. I’ve often wondered if Peirce’s dicisign doesn’t hold some similarities with deflationary accounts. BTW - speaking of Quine he actually has an essay where he responds to people pointing out parallels between himself and Peirce. I came upon it by accident in an used bookstore. He doesn’t think he parallels Peirce much. However it’s also clear he hasn’t read much Peirce either and is largely going by “received views of Peirce.” This was before the Peirce scholarship renaissance so I’m not sure his views on pragmatism are that helpful. Still it’s an interesting little paper. > The big issue for the contemporary nominalist, as Russell pointed out, is > whether similarity is sufficient first of all, and second, whether it works. > He argued that similarity, to work, must be a universal, so the nominalist > project, clever though it is, falls apart from the get go. He then argues > that once you accept this argument, that it is obvious that similarity is not > sufficient, since it raise the question, similarity of what? Everything is > similar to everything else in some respect, so we need respects. (I read this > argument in a mimeographed paper of Russell's at UCLA, and I am not sure that > it was ever published.) Was this during Russell’s bundle theory period? It is an interesting argument. > The reason why I go into this is that it has some bearing on how to evaluate > all of the questions. I think that it is a given that for any realist > position there is a nominalist position in the contemporary sense that can > fit the same assent structure. Typically one is realist about some things, > but not others (for example one can be a realist about physical laws but not > numbers, or vice versa). So contemporary nominalism, if it works at all, will > work for all claims of reality involving a specific external existence. This is an important point I think. The realism vs. nominalism debate in contemporary philosophy (or at least since WWII) can’t be separated from the issue of realism towards what? In that sense it’s different from the medieval debates. I first came to the realism debate via Dummett’s Truth and Other Enigmas back in college. But the way he cast the debate, especially in his papers “Nominalism” and “Realism,” tends to make things more confused rather than clearer IMO. I’ve not followed the argument much in contemporary analytic philosophy since college so I don’t know if that’s still a problem. (Peirce spoiled me) > This isn't so for traditional nominalism, since they assume the existence > external conditions that make claims about particulars, at least, true. > Similarity is likewise and external condition. I think nominalism was much easier when you could point to something like the monodology (or its more or less equivalence in Spinoza) or the more Cartesian views of extended space with properties. In contemporary physics everything is much more complex, which may be why Howard thought those positions in physics entailed scholastic realism. It’s also interesting in that even people I’d largely call nominalist in science still tend to have a “dodge” regarding the fundamental laws of physics that govern dynamics within fundamental stuff. Those they treat as real and in that sense they aren’t nominalists. However in practice they’re very nominalist towards everything else. i.e. don’t accept mathematical abstract entities, colors, qualia or so forth as mind independent. But it’s also tricky in that most scientists aren’t philosophically informed and thus are ignorant of many subtle issues. Incoherent beliefs that might bug a philosopher are thus quite common.
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