RE: SUO: RE: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Yes, but the term 'individual' has a very specific meaning
of concreteness in FOL. The question is of great importance
to me, so I repeat it, and hope for some comments:
Is an abstract concept (e.g., bird) an 'individual' in the
logical sense, or is only 'red robin on front lawn' an
individual in that sense?
Having found logic an excellent mechanism to apply to the
world, and finding philosophic works tragically simplistic,
I am very interested in the answer to this question.
Hoping for a clear response,
Rich
Tom Johnston wrote:
> 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
>
>