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Re: Nominalist?


At 10:49 +0200 5-07-2000, West, Matthew MR SSI-GPEA-UK wrote:
>Dear Colleagues,
>
>>  Nicola wrote
>>
>>  >By the way, better talking of "properties" rather than "classes". A
>>  >property can correspond to multiple classes (its extensions) in
>>  >different worlds/situations. This is related to the modality
>>  >discussion, however (different thread).
>
>John Sowa replied:
>>
>>  I agree.  Nominalists try to avoid talking about any kind of universals,
>>  but they sometimes admit sets or classes as the least objectionable
>>  kinds of abstract entities.
>
>I might infer from this that you consider me a nominalist. In which case I
>would like to take the opportunity to deny it. I consider sets, classes and
>tuples to be essential to be able to say anything useful. On the other hand
>I am not sure there are any "properties" that cannot be reduced to some
>combination of sets classes and tuples.

John neglected to mention that nominalists always deny being nominalists.

-ChrisW

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Christopher A. Welty        http://www.cs.vassar.edu/faculty/welty/
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