RE: SUO: RE: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Murray Altheim wrote:
> Jay Halcomb wrote:
> > Request for clarification: what are the
> > fearful/never-to-be-sufficiently-damned 'nominalistic
> patterns of thought'?
> >
> > Jay
>
> Nominalism by definition (Random House):
>
> the doctrine that general or abstract words do not stand for
> objectively existing entities and that universals are no more
> than names assigned to them
>
> In a nutshell, the oversimplification of the world, the idea that
> by putting a name on something you somehow understand it. Yes, you
> can recognize a dog when you see one, but does "dog" provide an
> understanding of doggedness? (doggyness? i.e., what constitutes the
> class of things known as dogs) A typically good example is "male"
> and "female", as if they were two poles of gender. They're not, and
> this is the typical kind of simplification that labelling tends to
> promote. As I mentioned previously, "species" has been proven a
> useful concept but turns out to be specious, nonexistent, and
> probably set us back in terms of actually investigating the real
> nature of evolutionary development, the real nature of the world.
>
<snip/>
>
> Murray
An earlier email mentioned INDIVIDUALS, which might constitute
EXAMPLE(s) that we want to group into TYPE(s) and CLASS(es).
Are you claiming that the TYPE(s) and CLASS(es) are also
INDIVIDUAL(s)?
It seems to me that, taking the above definition literally, a
nominalist would say that TYPE(s) and CLASS(es) are not in
fact INDIVIDUAL(s), while an antinominalist would claim that
they are.
Is this interpretation consistent with your thinking?
And from your expressive text, I assume you must be an antinominalist.
Is that also true?
But if, as you stated earlier (and I agreed to), interpretation
of words is entirely in the brain, not in the objects themselves.
Therefore, isn't it self contradictory to believe that TYPE(s)
are INDIVIDUAL(s)?
Please help me understand your position on this.
Thanks,
Rich