Dear Howard, lists This is where our ways part.
If iron really were "just a name classifying certain useful collections of fundamental particles" I would have no criteria for saying I have an iron knife. I have no access to the presumed fundamental particles in my knife, and if I had, I would have no way of connecting them stably to other such collections without reference to other universals. That is even evident from what Howard says - saying iron is "just a name classifying certain useful collections of fundamental particles" explains one universal by referring to another (namely "fundamental particles") which is 1) even more general and 2) further removed from direct observation. But explaining one universal with another may be a fine conceptual explanation - but it does not get us out of universals. What is worse, "useful" is also a universal. But is the word "iron" really "useful", now, or is "useful" just another name classifying certain collections of names ... The really hard-core nominalist would have to say that iron is "just a name classifying certain collections of particular phenomena" without further description of those phenomena (because such description will itself contain universals and thus beg the question). You might, it is true, add a list of those individual phenomena (e.g. seen where and when), but that will miss most if not all of what we use to take as established scientific and practical facts which are only describable by further universals (iron as element no. 26, a wide range of oxidation states, synthesized only in extremely large stars, the most common element of the Earth, central to the industrial revolution, very useful for alloys, etc.). I think that when Peirce said that working scientists were realists in their hearts, he referred to the fact that nominalist metaphysics leads to classify all such scientific results as mere fictions. Best F Den 06/11/2014 kl. 14.12 skrev Howard Pattee <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: HP: I think Nominalists could just as persuasively argue that round objects (i.e., circles) do not exist in Nature, and that iron is just a name classifying certain useful collections of fundamental particles. My point is that in both cases, none of the key words are unambiguously defined, and the argument is not decidable and goes nowhere.
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