Nominalism

Nominalism (from Latin nomen, name) — A philosophical position in the debate over universals according to which general terms such as “humanity”, “redness”, or “triangle” do not designate any real, independent entities: what exists are only concrete individual particulars, and universals are merely names or mental concepts. Nominalism is one of the three classic answers to the problem of universals, a question running through the whole history of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle onward. Its medieval formulation begins with Porphyry’s Isagoge, an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, which raised — without answering — whether genera and species exist in themselves or only in thought; transmitted by Boethius, these questions gave rise to the famous controversy over universals. Against realism, which grants universals real existence (prior to things in Plato, within them in Aristotle and in the moderate realism of Thomas Aquinas), the extreme nominalism of Roscellinus of Compiègne reduces the universal to flatus vocis, a mere “puff of air”. Conceptualism, an intermediate position associated with Peter Abelard, holds that universals exist as concepts in the mind but not outside it. The most influential medieval nominalist is William of Ockham, for whom universals are simply signs predicable of many individuals; tradition associates with him “Ockham’s Razor”, a principle of ontological parsimony. The most widely cited Latin formula — entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” — is, however, a late attribution: it was coined by the Franciscan John Punch in 1639, more than three centuries after Ockham’s death. Ockham’s authentic formulations are pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate (“plurality is not to be posited without necessity”) and frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora (“it is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer”). Concretely: there is no subsisting “redness”, only red things that we call by the same name. The debate persists in contemporary philosophy, for instance in trope theory, which replaces universals with particular instances of properties.

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