Problem of universals
Encyclopedia
The problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics
about whether universals
exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties
, kinds or relations, such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can be predicated of individuals or particulars or that individuals or particulars can be regarded as sharing or participating in. For example, Scott, Pat, and Chris have in common the universal quality of being human or humanity. While many standard cases of universals are also typically regarded as abstract objects (such as humanity), abstract objects are not necessarily universals. For example, numbers can be held to be particular yet abstract objects.
The problem of universals is about their status; as to whether universals exist independently of the individuals of whom they can be predicated or if they are merely convenient ways of talking about and finding similarity among particular things that are radically different. This has led philosophers
to raise questions like, if they exist, do they exist in the individuals or only in people's minds or in some separate metaphysical domain? Questions like these arise from attempts to account for the phenomenon of similarity or attribute agreement among things. For example, living grass and some apples are similar, namely in having the attribute of greenness. The issue, however, is how to account for this and related facts.
, idealism
and nominalism
(sometimes simply called "anti-realism" with regard to universals).
Realists tend to argue that universals must be posited as distinct entities in order to account for various phenomena. For example, a common realist argument, arguably found in Plato, is that universals are required for certain general words to have meaning and for the sentences in which they occur to be true or false. Take the sentence "Djivan Gasparyan
is a musician". The realist may claim that this sentence is only meaningful and expresses a truth because there is an individual, Djivan Gasparyan, who possesses a certain quality, musicianship. Thus it is assumed that the property is a universal which is distinct from the particular individual who has the property (MacLeod & Rubenstein, 2006, §1b).
and trope nominalism
. Nominalism has been endorsed or defended by many, including William of Ockham
, Peter Abelard
, D. C. Williams (1953), David Lewis
(1983) and arguably H. H. Price
(1953) and W. V. O. Quine (1961).
Nominalists often argue for their view by claiming that nominalism can account for all the relevant phenomena, and therefore—by Ockham's razor or some sort of principle of simplicity—nominalism is preferable, since it posits fewer entities. Whether nominalism can truly "account" for all of the relevant phenomena, is of course, hotly debated.
believed there to be a sharp distinction between the world of perceivable objects and the world of universals or forms: one can only have mere opinions about the former, but one can have knowledge
about the latter. For Plato it was not possible to have knowledge of anything that could change or was particular, since knowledge had to be forever unfailing and general. For that reason, the world of the forms is the real world, like sunlight
, the sensible world is only imperfectly or partially real, like shadows
. This Platonic realism
, however, in denying full reality to the material world, differs sharply with modern forms of idealism, which generally assert the reality of the external, physical world and which in some versions deny the reality of ideals.
One of the first nominalist critiques of Plato's realism was that of Diogenes of Sinope
, who said "I've seen Plato's cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness."
disagreed with his tutor. Aristotle transformed Plato's forms into "formal causes", the blueprints or essence
s of individual things. Whereas Plato idealized geometry
, Aristotle emphasized nature
and related disciplines and therefore much of his thinking concerns living beings and their properties. The nature of universals in Aristotle's philosophy therefore hinges on his view of natural kind
s.
Consider for example a particular oak
tree. This is a member of a species and it has much in common with other oak trees, past, present and future. Its universal, its oakness, is a part of it. A biologist can study oak trees and learn about oakness and more generally the intelligible order within the sensible world. Accordingly, Aristotle was more confident than Plato about coming to know the sensible world; he was a prototypical empiricist
and a founder of induction
. Aristotle was a new, moderate
sort of realist about universals.
's Isagoge
. It begins:
was intrigued by the works of Boethius, and wrote an extensive commentary on the Isagoge.
argued strongly against both nominalism and conceptualism, arguing instead for Scotist realism, a medieval response to the conceptualism of Abelard.
argued strongly that universals are a product of abstract human thought. According to Ockham, universals are just words/names that only exist in the mind and have no real place in the external world.
and John Duns Scotus. Aquinas argued that both the essence of a thing and its existence were clearly distinct, in this regard he is close to the teaching of Aristotle. Scotist realism argues that in a thing there is no real distinction between the essence and the existence, instead there is only a Formal distinction
. Both these opinions were denied by Scotus' pupil William of Ockham.
Roscellinus
(c. 1050-c. 1125) was an early, prominent proponent of this view. It can be found in the work of Peter Abelard
and reached its flowering in William of Ockham
, who was the most influential and thorough nominalist. Abelard's and Ockham's version of nominalism is sometimes called conceptualism
, which presents itself as a middle way between nominalism and realism, asserting that there is something in common among like individuals, but that it is a concept in the mind, rather than a real entity existing independently of the mind. Ockham argued that only individuals existed and that universals were only mental ways of referring to sets of individuals. "I maintain", he wrote, "that a universal is not something real that exists in a subject... but that it has a being only as a thought-object in the mind [objectivum in anima]". As a general rule, Ockham argued against assuming any entities that were not necessary for explanations. Accordingly, he wrote, there is no reason to believe that there is an entity called "humanity" that resides inside, say, Socrates, and nothing further is explained by making this claim. This is in accord with the analytical method which has since come to be called Ockham's razor, the principle that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.
Critics argue that conceptualist approaches only answer the psychological question of universals. If the same concept is correctly and non-arbitrarily applied to two individuals, there must be some resemblance or shared property between the two individuals that justifies their falling under the same concept and that is just the metaphysical problem that universals were brought in to address, the starting-point of the whole problem (MacLeod & Rubenstein, 2006, §3d). If resemblances between individuals are asserted, conceptualism becomes moderate realism; if they are denied, it collapses into nominalism.
, best known for his empiricism, was also an advocate of an extreme nominalism. Indeed, he disbelieved even in the possibility of a general thought as a psychological fact. It is impossible to imagine a man, the argument goes, unless one has in mind a very specific picture of one who is either tall or short, European or Asian, blue-eyed or brown-eyed, et cetera. When one thinks of a triangle
, likewise, it is always obtuse, right-angled or acute. There is no mental image of a triangle in general. Not only then do general terms fail to correspond to extra-mental realities, they don't correspond to thoughts either.
Berkeleyan nominalism contributed to the same thinker's critique of the possibility of matter. In the climate of English thought in the period following Isaac Newton
's major contributions to physics
, there was much discussion of a distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities
. The primary qualities were supposed to be true of material objects in themselves (size, position, momentum
) whereas the secondary qualities were supposed to be more subjective (color
and sound
). But on Berkeley's view, just as it is meaningless to speak of triangularity in general aside from specific figures, so it is meaningless to speak of mass in motion without knowing the colour. If the colour is in the eye of the beholder, so is the mass.
discussed the problem of universals in the course of a book that eviscerated the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton
. Mill wrote, "The formation of a concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the same object and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object".
At this point in his discussion he seems to be siding with Berkeley. But he proceeds to concede, under some verbal camouflage, that Berkeley's position is factually wrong and that every human mind performs the trick Berkeley thought impossible:
In other words, we may be "temporarily unconscious" of whether an image is white, black or yellow and concentrate our attention on the fact that it is a man and on just those attributes necessary to identify it as a man (but not as any particular one). It may then have the significance of a universal of manhood.
, developed his own views on the problem of universals in the course of a review of an edition of the writings of George Berkeley. Peirce begins with the observation that "Berkeley's metaphysical
theories have at first sight an air of paradox and levity very unbecoming to a bishop". He includes among these paradoxical doctrines Berkeley's denial of "the possibility of forming the simplest general conception". He wrote that if there is some mental fact that works in practice the way that a universal would, that fact is a universal. "If I have learned a formula in gibberish which in any way jogs my memory so as to enable me in each single case to act as though I had a general idea, what possible utility is there in distinguishing between such a gibberish... and an idea?" Peirce also held as a matter of ontology
that what he called "thirdness", the more general facts about the world, are extra-mental realities.
learned pragmatism, this way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Which was not to Peirce's taste - he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead). Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology:
There are at least three ways in which a realist might try to answer James' challenge of explaining the reason why universal conceptions are more lofty than those of particulars - there is the moral/political answer, the mathematical/scientific answer and the anti-paradoxical answer. Each has contemporary or near contemporary advocates.
The moral or political response is given by the conservative philosopher Richard M. Weaver
in Ideas Have Consequences
, where he describes how the acceptance of "the fateful doctrine of nominalism" was "the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence".
Roger Penrose
contends that the foundations of mathematics
can't be understood absent the Platonic view that "mathematical truth is absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made criteria ... mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own..."
Nino Cocchiarella
(1975), professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana University, has maintained that conceptual realism is the best response to certain logical paradoxes to which nominalism leads. It is noted that in a sense Cocchiarella has adopted Platonism for anti-Platonic reasons. Plato, as seen in the dialogue Parmenides, was willing to accept a certain amount of paradox with his forms. Cocchiarella adopts the forms to avoid paradox.
has been one of the leading realists in the twentieth century, and has used a concept of universals to build a naturalistic and scientifically realist ontology upon. In both Universals and Scientific Realism and Universals: An Opinionated Introduction, Armstrong describes the relative merits of a number of nominalist theories which appeal either to "natural classes" (a view he ascribes to Anthony Quinton
), concepts, resemblance relations or predicates, and also discusses non-realist "trope" accounts (which he describes in the Universals and Scientific Realism volumes as "particularism"). He gives a number of reasons to reject all of these, but also dismisses a number of realist accounts.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
about whether universals
Universal (metaphysics)
In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For example, suppose there are two chairs in a room, each of...
exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties
Property (philosophy)
In modern philosophy, logic, and mathematics a property is an attribute of an object; a red object is said to have the property of redness. The property may be considered a form of object in its own right, able to possess other properties. A property however differs from individual objects in that...
, kinds or relations, such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can be predicated of individuals or particulars or that individuals or particulars can be regarded as sharing or participating in. For example, Scott, Pat, and Chris have in common the universal quality of being human or humanity. While many standard cases of universals are also typically regarded as abstract objects (such as humanity), abstract objects are not necessarily universals. For example, numbers can be held to be particular yet abstract objects.
The problem of universals is about their status; as to whether universals exist independently of the individuals of whom they can be predicated or if they are merely convenient ways of talking about and finding similarity among particular things that are radically different. This has led philosophers
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
to raise questions like, if they exist, do they exist in the individuals or only in people's minds or in some separate metaphysical domain? Questions like these arise from attempts to account for the phenomenon of similarity or attribute agreement among things. For example, living grass and some apples are similar, namely in having the attribute of greenness. The issue, however, is how to account for this and related facts.
Positions
There are three main positions on the issue: realismPhilosophical realism
Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc....
, idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
and nominalism
Nominalism
Nominalism is a metaphysical view in philosophy according to which general or abstract terms and predicates exist, while universals or abstract objects, which are sometimes thought to correspond to these terms, do not exist. Thus, there are at least two main versions of nominalism...
(sometimes simply called "anti-realism" with regard to universals).
Realism
The realist school claims that universals are real — they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate them. There are various forms of realism. Two major forms are Platonic realism (universalia ante res) and Aristotelian realism (universalia in rebus). Platonic realism is the view that universals are real entities and they exist independent of particulars. Aristotelian realism, on the other hand, is the view that universals are real entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them.Realists tend to argue that universals must be posited as distinct entities in order to account for various phenomena. For example, a common realist argument, arguably found in Plato, is that universals are required for certain general words to have meaning and for the sentences in which they occur to be true or false. Take the sentence "Djivan Gasparyan
Djivan Gasparyan
Djivan Gasparyan is an Armenian musician and composer. He plays the duduk, a double reed woodwind instrument related to the orchestral oboe. Gasparyan is known as the Master of the duduk.-Biography:...
is a musician". The realist may claim that this sentence is only meaningful and expresses a truth because there is an individual, Djivan Gasparyan, who possesses a certain quality, musicianship. Thus it is assumed that the property is a universal which is distinct from the particular individual who has the property (MacLeod & Rubenstein, 2006, §1b).
Nominalism
Nominalists assert that only individuals or particulars exist and deny that universals are real (i.e. that they exist as entities or beings). The term "nominalism" comes from the Latin nomen ("name"). There are various forms of nominalism (which is sometimes also referred to as "terminism"), three major forms are resemblance nominalism, conceptualismConceptualism
Conceptualism is a philosophical theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between Nominalism and Realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies...
and trope nominalism
Trope (philosophy)
The term "trope" is both a term which denotes figurative and metaphorical language and one which has been used in various technical senses. The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος , "a turn, a change", related to the root of the verb τρέπειν , "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change"; this...
. Nominalism has been endorsed or defended by many, including William of Ockham
William of Ockham
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
, Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary...
, D. C. Williams (1953), David Lewis
David Kellogg Lewis
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years...
(1983) and arguably H. H. Price
H. H. Price
Henry Habberley Price was a Welsh philosopher, known for his work on perception. He also wrote on parapsychology....
(1953) and W. V. O. Quine (1961).
Nominalists often argue for their view by claiming that nominalism can account for all the relevant phenomena, and therefore—by Ockham's razor or some sort of principle of simplicity—nominalism is preferable, since it posits fewer entities. Whether nominalism can truly "account" for all of the relevant phenomena, is of course, hotly debated.
Idealism
Idealism is a broad category that includes several diverse themes, from Kant's radical doubt about what can truly be perceived externally to Hegel's Absolute Ideal at the verification of the sum of potential manifestations of matter and concepts. This position argues that the nature of reality is based only in our minds or ideas. The external world is inseparable from the mind, consciousness or perceptions. Universals are real and exist independently of that on which they might be predicated.Plato
PlatoPlato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
believed there to be a sharp distinction between the world of perceivable objects and the world of universals or forms: one can only have mere opinions about the former, but one can have knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
about the latter. For Plato it was not possible to have knowledge of anything that could change or was particular, since knowledge had to be forever unfailing and general. For that reason, the world of the forms is the real world, like sunlight
Allegory of the cave
The Allegory of the Cave—also known as the Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave, or the Parable of the Cave—is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education"...
, the sensible world is only imperfectly or partially real, like shadows
Allegory of the cave
The Allegory of the Cave—also known as the Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave, or the Parable of the Cave—is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education"...
. This Platonic realism
Platonic realism
Platonic realism is a philosophical term usually used to refer to the idea of realism regarding the existence of universals or abstract objects after the Greek philosopher Plato , a student of Socrates. As universals were considered by Plato to be ideal forms, this stance is confusingly also called...
, however, in denying full reality to the material world, differs sharply with modern forms of idealism, which generally assert the reality of the external, physical world and which in some versions deny the reality of ideals.
One of the first nominalist critiques of Plato's realism was that of Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes the Cynic was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. Also known as Diogenes of Sinope , he was born in Sinope , an Ionian colony on the Black Sea , in 412 or 404 BCE and died at Corinth in 323 BCE.Diogenes of Sinope was a controversial figure...
, who said "I've seen Plato's cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness."
Aristotle
Plato's student AristotleAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
disagreed with his tutor. Aristotle transformed Plato's forms into "formal causes", the blueprints or essence
Essence
In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without...
s of individual things. Whereas Plato idealized geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
, Aristotle emphasized nature
Nature (philosophy)
Nature is a concept with two major sets of inter-related meanings, referring on the one hand to the things which are natural, or subject to the normal working of "laws of nature", or on the other hand to the essential properties and causes of those things to be what they naturally are, or in other...
and related disciplines and therefore much of his thinking concerns living beings and their properties. The nature of universals in Aristotle's philosophy therefore hinges on his view of natural kind
Natural kind
In philosophy, a natural kind is a "natural" grouping, not an artificial one. Or, it is something that a set of things has in common which distinguishes it from other things as a real set rather than as a group of things arbitrarily lumped together by a person or group of people.If any natural...
s.
Consider for example a particular oak
Oak
An oak is a tree or shrub in the genus Quercus , of which about 600 species exist. "Oak" may also appear in the names of species in related genera, notably Lithocarpus...
tree. This is a member of a species and it has much in common with other oak trees, past, present and future. Its universal, its oakness, is a part of it. A biologist can study oak trees and learn about oakness and more generally the intelligible order within the sensible world. Accordingly, Aristotle was more confident than Plato about coming to know the sensible world; he was a prototypical empiricist
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
and a founder of induction
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
. Aristotle was a new, moderate
Moderate realism
Moderate realism is a position in the debate on the metaphysics of universals which holds that there is no realm in which universals exist , nor do they really exist within the individuals as universals, but rather universals really exist within the particulars as individualised, and multiplied...
sort of realist about universals.
Boethius
The problem was introduced to the medieval world by Boethius, by his translation of PorphyryPorphyry (philosopher)
Porphyry of Tyre , Porphyrios, AD 234–c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Tyre. He edited and published the Enneads, the only collection of the work of his teacher Plotinus. He also wrote many works himself on a wide variety of topics...
's Isagoge
Isagoge
The Isagoge or "Introduction" to Aristotle's "Categories", written by Porphyry in Greek and translated into Latin by Boethius, was the standard textbook on logic for at least a millennium after his death. It was composed by Porphyry in Sicily during the years 268-270, and sent to Chrysaorium,...
. It begins:
Abelard
Peter AbelardPeter Abelard
Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary...
was intrigued by the works of Boethius, and wrote an extensive commentary on the Isagoge.
Duns Scotus
Duns ScotusDuns Scotus
Blessed John Duns Scotus, O.F.M. was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was nicknamed Doctor Subtilis for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought....
argued strongly against both nominalism and conceptualism, arguing instead for Scotist realism, a medieval response to the conceptualism of Abelard.
Ockham
William of OckhamWilliam of Ockham
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
argued strongly that universals are a product of abstract human thought. According to Ockham, universals are just words/names that only exist in the mind and have no real place in the external world.
Medieval realism
Realism was argued for by both Thomas AquinasThomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
and John Duns Scotus. Aquinas argued that both the essence of a thing and its existence were clearly distinct, in this regard he is close to the teaching of Aristotle. Scotist realism argues that in a thing there is no real distinction between the essence and the existence, instead there is only a Formal distinction
Formal distinction
In scholastic metaphysics, a formal distinction is a distinction intermediate between what is merely conceptual, and what is fully real or mind-independent...
. Both these opinions were denied by Scotus' pupil William of Ockham.
Medieval nominalism
Nominalism was first formulated as a philosophical theory in the Middle Ages. The French philosopher and theologianTheology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
Roscellinus
Roscellinus
Roscellinus, also called Roscelin of Compiègne or in Latin Roscellinus Compendiensis and Rucelinus , was a French philosopher and theologian, often regarded as the founder of nominalism .-Biography:...
(c. 1050-c. 1125) was an early, prominent proponent of this view. It can be found in the work of Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary...
and reached its flowering in William of Ockham
William of Ockham
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
, who was the most influential and thorough nominalist. Abelard's and Ockham's version of nominalism is sometimes called conceptualism
Conceptualism
Conceptualism is a philosophical theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between Nominalism and Realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies...
, which presents itself as a middle way between nominalism and realism, asserting that there is something in common among like individuals, but that it is a concept in the mind, rather than a real entity existing independently of the mind. Ockham argued that only individuals existed and that universals were only mental ways of referring to sets of individuals. "I maintain", he wrote, "that a universal is not something real that exists in a subject... but that it has a being only as a thought-object in the mind [objectivum in anima]". As a general rule, Ockham argued against assuming any entities that were not necessary for explanations. Accordingly, he wrote, there is no reason to believe that there is an entity called "humanity" that resides inside, say, Socrates, and nothing further is explained by making this claim. This is in accord with the analytical method which has since come to be called Ockham's razor, the principle that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.
Critics argue that conceptualist approaches only answer the psychological question of universals. If the same concept is correctly and non-arbitrarily applied to two individuals, there must be some resemblance or shared property between the two individuals that justifies their falling under the same concept and that is just the metaphysical problem that universals were brought in to address, the starting-point of the whole problem (MacLeod & Rubenstein, 2006, §3d). If resemblances between individuals are asserted, conceptualism becomes moderate realism; if they are denied, it collapses into nominalism.
Berkeley
George BerkeleyGeorge Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
, best known for his empiricism, was also an advocate of an extreme nominalism. Indeed, he disbelieved even in the possibility of a general thought as a psychological fact. It is impossible to imagine a man, the argument goes, unless one has in mind a very specific picture of one who is either tall or short, European or Asian, blue-eyed or brown-eyed, et cetera. When one thinks of a triangle
Triangle
A triangle is one of the basic shapes of geometry: a polygon with three corners or vertices and three sides or edges which are line segments. A triangle with vertices A, B, and C is denoted ....
, likewise, it is always obtuse, right-angled or acute. There is no mental image of a triangle in general. Not only then do general terms fail to correspond to extra-mental realities, they don't correspond to thoughts either.
Berkeleyan nominalism contributed to the same thinker's critique of the possibility of matter. In the climate of English thought in the period following Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
's major contributions to physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
, there was much discussion of a distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities
Primary/secondary quality distinction
The primary/secondary quality distinction is a conceptual distinction in epistemology and metaphysics, concerning the nature of reality. It is most explicitly articulated by John Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, but earlier thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes made similar...
. The primary qualities were supposed to be true of material objects in themselves (size, position, momentum
Momentum
In classical mechanics, linear momentum or translational momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object...
) whereas the secondary qualities were supposed to be more subjective (color
Color
Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
and sound
Sound
Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...
). But on Berkeley's view, just as it is meaningless to speak of triangularity in general aside from specific figures, so it is meaningless to speak of mass in motion without knowing the colour. If the colour is in the eye of the beholder, so is the mass.
Mill
John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
discussed the problem of universals in the course of a book that eviscerated the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet was a Scottish metaphysician.-Early life:He was born in Glasgow. He was from an academic family, including Robert Hamilton, the economist...
. Mill wrote, "The formation of a concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the same object and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object".
At this point in his discussion he seems to be siding with Berkeley. But he proceeds to concede, under some verbal camouflage, that Berkeley's position is factually wrong and that every human mind performs the trick Berkeley thought impossible:
In other words, we may be "temporarily unconscious" of whether an image is white, black or yellow and concentrate our attention on the fact that it is a man and on just those attributes necessary to identify it as a man (but not as any particular one). It may then have the significance of a universal of manhood.
Peirce
The 19th century American logician Charles Sanders Peirce, known as the father of pragmatismPragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
, developed his own views on the problem of universals in the course of a review of an edition of the writings of George Berkeley. Peirce begins with the observation that "Berkeley's metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
theories have at first sight an air of paradox and levity very unbecoming to a bishop". He includes among these paradoxical doctrines Berkeley's denial of "the possibility of forming the simplest general conception". He wrote that if there is some mental fact that works in practice the way that a universal would, that fact is a universal. "If I have learned a formula in gibberish which in any way jogs my memory so as to enable me in each single case to act as though I had a general idea, what possible utility is there in distinguishing between such a gibberish... and an idea?" Peirce also held as a matter of ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
that what he called "thirdness", the more general facts about the world, are extra-mental realities.
James
William JamesWilliam James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
learned pragmatism, this way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance. (Which was not to Peirce's taste - he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead). Although James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology:
There are at least three ways in which a realist might try to answer James' challenge of explaining the reason why universal conceptions are more lofty than those of particulars - there is the moral/political answer, the mathematical/scientific answer and the anti-paradoxical answer. Each has contemporary or near contemporary advocates.
The moral or political response is given by the conservative philosopher Richard M. Weaver
Richard M. Weaver
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid- 20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric...
in Ideas Have Consequences
Ideas Have Consequences
Ideas Have Consequences is a philosophical work by Richard M. Weaver, published in 1948. The book is largely a treatise on the harmful effects of nominalism on Western Civilization since this doctrine gained prominence in the High Middle Ages, followed by a prescription of a course of action...
, where he describes how the acceptance of "the fateful doctrine of nominalism" was "the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence".
Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose
Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College...
contends that the foundations of mathematics
Philosophy of mathematics
The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
can't be understood absent the Platonic view that "mathematical truth is absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made criteria ... mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own..."
Nino Cocchiarella
Nino Cocchiarella
Nino Cocchiarella , Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Indiana University, is best known for his work in formal logic and ontology....
(1975), professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana University, has maintained that conceptual realism is the best response to certain logical paradoxes to which nominalism leads. It is noted that in a sense Cocchiarella has adopted Platonism for anti-Platonic reasons. Plato, as seen in the dialogue Parmenides, was willing to accept a certain amount of paradox with his forms. Cocchiarella adopts the forms to avoid paradox.
Armstrong
The Australian philosopher David Malet ArmstrongDavid Malet Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, is an Australian philosopher. He is well-known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the...
has been one of the leading realists in the twentieth century, and has used a concept of universals to build a naturalistic and scientifically realist ontology upon. In both Universals and Scientific Realism and Universals: An Opinionated Introduction, Armstrong describes the relative merits of a number of nominalist theories which appeal either to "natural classes" (a view he ascribes to Anthony Quinton
Anthony Quinton, Baron Quinton
Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton was a British political and moral philosopher, metaphysician, and materialist philosopher of mind.-Life:...
), concepts, resemblance relations or predicates, and also discusses non-realist "trope" accounts (which he describes in the Universals and Scientific Realism volumes as "particularism"). He gives a number of reasons to reject all of these, but also dismisses a number of realist accounts.
See also
- Abstract objectAbstract objectAn abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing . In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta An abstract object is an...
- Bundle theoryBundle theoryBundle theory, originated by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, is the ontological theory about objecthood in which an object consists only of a collection of properties, relations or tropes....
- ConceptualismConceptualismConceptualism is a philosophical theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between Nominalism and Realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies...
- NominalismNominalismNominalism is a metaphysical view in philosophy according to which general or abstract terms and predicates exist, while universals or abstract objects, which are sometimes thought to correspond to these terms, do not exist. Thus, there are at least two main versions of nominalism...
- Object (philosophy)Object (philosophy)An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
- Philosophy of mathematicsPhilosophy of mathematicsThe philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
- Platonic form
- Realism (philosophy)
- Universal (metaphysics)Universal (metaphysics)In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For example, suppose there are two chairs in a room, each of...