RE: SUO: RE: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Murray said of nominalism that it is: In a nutshell, the oversimplification
of the world, the idea that
> by putting a name on something you somehow understand it.
In nutshells, as I said earlier today, realism will always come out looking
better than nominalism. Johnson refuted Berkeley by kicking a rock. Realism
is solid, common-sense, linked up to the world stuff. Nominalism is
airy-fairy sophistical word play. If the best soundbite wins, I don't want
to play.
I'm enough of a nominalist to know that words don't picture things, or
universals, that sentences don't picture facts or states of affairs, that we
can't find a language-independent perspective from which to judge the fit of
sentences to the facts, the names to the things. I'm also enough of a
common-sensical type to know that when I go to the grocery store to pick up
a gallon of milk, and return home, my wife's going to know whether I messed
up or not by looking in the shopping bag. I'm also enough of a realist to
know that saying it's so doesn't make it so, that somehow or other, words
and statements bump up against a stubborn something or other, and that some
of those linguistic pieces (on their specific occasions of use) survive the
encounter while others don't.
As stated, in these soundbites, this makes me a philosophical baby-kissing
politician, trying to please everybody. To turn me into something more
serious, I have to move beyond sound bites. Realists, who win by default at
the sound-bite level, frequently resist moving beyond those sound bites,
beyond that Johnsonian, robust, manly rock-kicking that shows the effete
nominalist (or idealist) philosophers for the frivolous sophists they are.
Here's something I can guarantee you, with all the (limited) knowledge of
this history of realism/nominalism that I have: western man, at least, is
still in the thrall of Plato's image of those locked in a cave, looking at
shadows cast on a wall, capable of obtaining real knowledge only by turning
around and looking at what casts those shadows. What casts them are
universals like goodness, triangularity, and so forth. Knowledge is
confrontation with reality, as it really is. Knowledge is expressed in true
statements which are true because their parts correspond to / name real
things. The history of philosophy can very fruitfully be viewed as a
struggle to free ourselves from this enthrallment, to get a better way of
describing how the world makes our statements about it true. Once nominalism
was re-characterized as "relativism", it's like any liberal position
re-characterized by Rush Limbaugh. It's on the defensive, and usually
ill-equiped to defend itself in the world of sound-bites.
Read Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Quine, Richard Rorty. Even if you don't
agree, I don't think you will find it was a waste of time.
With apologies to my realist friend, Murray.
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Cooper [mailto:rich@valutech.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2003 1:00 PM
To: Murray Altheim; Jay Halcomb
Cc: Chris Angus; Joshua Allen; Tom Johnston; Jon Awbrey; SUO
Subject: 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