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Nominalism

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-N038-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-N038-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/nominalism/v-1

3. Classical British empiricism

The classical empiricists followed Abelard and Ockham in denying that general terms signify universals. Thus, Hobbes sounds a familiar theme when he tells us that the only things that exist are particulars and that the terms ‘general’ and ‘universal’ are just ‘names of names’. Like their medieval forbears, the empiricists recognized that the plausibility of this view hinges on our ability to provide a satisfactory account of the relation between general terms and the inner representations or ideas corresponding to them. Locke, who agrees that extramental entities are one and all particulars, argues that words signify ideas and that the ideas corresponding to general terms are abstract ideas - ideas formed from our ideas of particulars by separating out the features peculiar to this or that particular, retaining ‘only what is common’ to all the things to which a given general term applies. Berkeley goes further in his nominalism, denying that we have abstract ideas of the sort Locke describes. On Locke’s view, the process of forming an abstract idea of a triangle, for example, consists in separating out all those features with respect to which triangles differ; and the result of this process is an idea of a triangle that is ‘neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral nor equicrural nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once’. Berkeley challenges us to identify an idea that corresponds to this characterization. As he sees it, our ideas are determinate in all their features and, accordingly, particular in their content (see Hobbes, T. §3; Locke, J. §6; Berkeley, G. §2).

While Berkeley attacks the view that ideas are general in virtue of being abstract, he concedes that there are general ideas; but he insists that the generality of an idea is a function of its role in thinking rather than any special kind of content. Ideas are general not because they result from abstraction in Locke’s sense, but because the idea is made ‘to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort’. So the mind takes an idea that is fully determinate and particular in its content and makes it stand for other ideas of the same kind. Hume wholeheartedly endorses Berkeley’s attack on abstraction and his account of generality, telling us that general ideas are ‘in themselves individual, however they may become general in their representation. The image in the mind is only that of a particular object, though the application of it in our reasoning be the same as if it were universal(Hume [1740] 1978: 20).

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Citing this article:
Loux, Michael J.. Classical British empiricism. Nominalism, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N038-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/nominalism/v-1/sections/classical-british-empiricism.
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