Peircers, The following post from about this time 2 years ago pretty well summarizes my current view of the whole nominalism vs. realism controversy. To be as brief as possible, I do not see the issue as reflecting some cosmic battle between good and evil, but simply a matter of what rules are best to adopt for the direction of our ingenuities.
We are all nominalists, or Ockhamists, to the extent that we recognize the practical sensibility of guiding our inquiries according to one or another principle of economy. It is only the extreme nominalist who turns Ockham's Razor into Ockham's Chainsaw Massacre, but there the problem lies with the extremism, not with the practical utility of the Razor. We are all realists to the extent that we do not go about kicking everything that “looks like a rock” just to see if it “really is a rock”. But not all descriptions describe anything and problems arise when we confuse the being of a sign for the sign of a being. Regards, Jon Pragmatism About Theoretical Entities ===================================== https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2015/01/20/pragmatism-about-theoretical-entities-1/ By theoretical entities I mean things like classes, properties, qualities, sets, situations, or states of affairs, in general, the putative denotations of theoretical concepts, formulas, sentences, in brief, the ostensible objects of signs. A conventional statement of Ockham's Razor is — ☞ “Entities shall not be multiplied beyond necessity.” That is still good advice, as practical maxims go, but a pragmatist will read that as practical necessity or utility, qualifying the things that we need to posit in order to think at all, without getting lost in endless circumlocutions of perfectly good notions. Nominalistic revolts are well-intentioned when they naturally arise, seeking to clear away the clutter of ostentatious entities ostensibly denoted by signs that do not denote. But that is no different in its basic intention than what Peirce sought to do, clarifying metaphysics though the application of the Pragmatic Maxim. Taking the long view, then, pragmatism can be seen as a moderate continuation of Ockham's revolt, substituting a principled revolution for what tends to descend to a reign of terror. -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
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