ON NOMINALISM, PHENOMENALISM AND THEIR ANTITHESES

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ON NOMINALISM, PHENOMENALISM AND THEIR ANTITHESES

Real existence of predicates or universals, or of all abstract entities, is denied by nominalists. They do not want to commit themselves to (the existence of) 'something which all gray objects have in common', or to any other attribute or relation. According to another definition of nominalism they admit solely the existence of particulars and eschew all reference to nonindividuals such as classes or sets of particulars. Also numbers as classes of classes do not exist, then, in the nominalists' eyes. However, this respectable sobriety may not preclude these same nominalists from recognizing as an individual any sum of two arbitrary individuals, even if they have no property in common whatsoever, or even if no general term is applicable to both of them (while not being applicable to other possible candidates). Should the legs of your body and the legs of your table be individuals in such a nominalist 'calculus of individuals', the sum of one of your legs and one of the table's legs will be an individual as well. Nominalists who do not want to recognize the existence of classes or sets may thus in the end hardly be more sober than nonnominalistic realists who recognize at least some nonindividuals (such as classes of particulars) as existents, or as values for predicate variables.

Our recognition that abstract entities 'exist' and can be 'things' in a world of their own, not in space and time, is a kind of realism, and is contradictory to the form of nominalism founded upon a rejection of all abstract entities. On the other hand, we will not admit sets of particulars as existing just because one can theoretically construct such sets. (If a set exists, then it has one or more attributes, not only nonattributive members.) Not admitting this kind of nonindividuals, our system could be called "nominalistic" in this respect. Perhaps conventionalism would better describe our position, for we consider the calculus of classes or functions, or set theory, as a 'creation of the mind' good for a convenient interpretation of the world. But then, we will not adopt the kind of conventionalism according to which all formal and scientific theories are nothing else than systems of linguistic conventions. What complicates matters is that we need to make a distinction between existence and thingness, and that we will recognize the existence of relations, but not their thingness when talking about physical reality (in what will turn out to be the primary domain of discourse). Traditional philosophical distinctions like the one between nominalism or 'antirealism' and (nonnominalist) realism, may just not be applicable anymore to novel conceptual structures, or at least not unequivocally. Moreover, there are good reasons to avoid terms like nominalistic and realistic altogether, because of the dissimilar meanings they both have been given. The term realistic is not only opposed to nominalistic or antirealistic, and not only to unrealistic, but also to particularistic, in which case it refers to a different interpretation of phenomenalist systems. The distinction between phenomenalist and physicalist systems is, then, itself one in addition to the distinction nominalism versus (logical, nonnominalist) realism.

If physical entities such as objects or processes are chosen as the basic units of an ontological, constructional system, then it is called "physicalistic"; if phenomenal entities such as qualia or presentations are chosen, then "phenomenalistic". (A quale is a property which is considered an object of experience rather than the physical entity itself which has that poperty: it is the characteristic presented by that physical entity.) In both systems the basic units are individuals which can be perceived by one of the senses. Physicalists and phenomenalists both claim epistemological priority for their own basic units, but it has been demonstrated already by theorists with less absolutist pretensions that it is hard to understand what such would mean in the first place. Now, if the basic units of a phenomenalist system are nonconcrete, qualitative elements, then it has also been called "realistic"; if they are spatiotemporal particulars like phenomenal events, then "particularistic". Those free from metaphysical, ontological or epistemological absolutism have also made clear before, that when choosing between these different systems, it is most of all the way in which they deal with the relationship between qualities and particulars which matters (and not so much the metaphysical priority of either qualities or particulars). Thus a particularist theory is faced with a problem of abstraction: how to obtain repeatable, abstract universals from concrete particulars; but an (antiparticularistic) realist theory is faced with a problem of concretion: how to obtain unrepeatable, concrete particulars from abstract qualities.

Attention has already been drawn to the fact that every perceptible object can be described in two different ways, namely (1) by the parts it consists of -- as such it is conceived of as a whole of component parts -- and (2) by what it looks like, what it does, how it relates to other objects, how it is changing or not, and so forth. The latter thing is done by mentioning the object's inherent characteristics, its actions, its relations, and its changes or lack thereof. All these latter elements of the object, whether 'essential' or accidental, are attributes and relations, that is, predicates, of the thing in question in a broad, but strict sense. By speaking of these elements the object is conceived of as something which has a collection of attributes, and a number of relations with other objects. But while every object presents itself in this view as a whole of component parts and/or by the attributes it has, the parts themselves are in their turn also presented by their parts and the attributes (and relations) they have. This pattern can be pursued until those objects emerge which cannot be described by mentioning their parts any longer, but only by referring to their attributes (so far as the internal elements are concerned). We are assuming, then, that there is an end to this process of dissection -- an assumption necessary to arrive at the basic elements of this ontological system: the attributes. On this construction every object is a more or less complex system of attributes, a structure of which the 'materials' (the minimal basic units) are the attributes. (Relations exist between things and are in this domain of discourse no material of any of the discrete things they relate to each other.) Altho an attribute is a nonphysical entity -- and therefore our system not physicalistic -- it need not be a phenomenal entity either. It may be or cause single phenomenal colors, sounds, tactual sensations, and so on, but it may also be a mental or other nonphenomenal (and nonphysical) entity. Insofar as our system is phenomenalistic, however, it is also realistic (in a nonparticularist sense).

©MVVM, 41-56