Relation to truth· Truth, language and science
Nominalism
Axis: Universals — Do general properties exist, or are they merely names?
Only individuals exist. Redness is nothing apart from red things: it is a name we apply to objects that resemble one another. Universals are in language, not in the world.
Movements 1
Empiricismexplicit
Nominalism follows directly from the sensory origin of ideas: every perception is of a particular, this triangle, this shade, never of a universal in general, which therefore has no corresponding idea in the mind. Locke still admitted abstract ideas obtained by separation; objects that one cannot form the idea of a triangle that is neither equilateral nor scalene, and reduces the general to a sign standing in for all its likes. Generality thus passes into language, not into things, which dismisses Forms and realist essences as entities with no purchase in experience.
Locke, Essay, III; Hume, Treatise, I, I, 7
Philosophers 5
George Berkeleyexplicit
The introduction to the opens with a polemic against 's : one cannot, Berkeley argues, form the idea of a triangle that is neither equilateral nor scalene, nor of a colour that is no particular colour. Every idea is particular; a word becomes general not because it signifies an abstract essence but because a particular sign stands indifferently for all the individuals resembling it. This is an outright nominalism, and it is not incidental: for Berkeley it is precisely the belief in abstractions that had made it possible to forge the empty concept of matter, the idea of a thing stripped of every perceived quality.
Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§6-20
Spinozaexplicit
Universal notions such as "man" or "horse" are not realities: they arise from the confusion of too many images the mind cannot distinguish. They are beings of reason, not things; Spinoza is a nominalist.
Ethics, II, prop. 40, scholium 1
Humeexplicit
Following Berkeley, Hume denies that abstract general ideas exist: an idea is always particular, but a general word ties it to others that resemble it and can recall them. Universals are a matter of words and habit, not of realities.
A Treatise of Human Nature, I, I, 7
Show inferred positions (2)
Nietzscheinferable
Concepts arise by equating what is not equal: forgetting singular differences, we forge forms and essences where there are only unique, shifting cases. The universal is a useful fiction, not a reality.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
Wittgensteininferable
Against the idea that a general word covers a common essence, Wittgenstein invites us to look rather than to suppose: "games" share no single feature, only a network of criss-crossing similarities, like the features of a family, a . The old problem of universals is dissolved, not solved: the error was to presuppose that there had to be something common. Neither a realism of Forms nor a classical nominalism, but a deflation through use.
Philosophical Investigations, §§65-67 (§66, "don't think, but look!")