Nominalism

1. Introduction

In one use, ‘nominalism’ refers to a cluster of loosely-related philosophical and theological themes articulated by certain late fourteenth-century thinkers who were influenced by William of Ockham. These thinkers expressed doubts about the Aristotelian metaphysics, in particular its use in proving God’s existence. They gave priority to faith over reason and emphasized the omnipotence of God in ways that often led to a Divine Command theory in ethics and a general scepticism about our knowledge of both causal relations and the substance-accident distinction.

Used this way, the term has its roots in the more common use which refers to a general theoretical orientation to questions about the existence and nature of abstract entities, an orientation exemplified in the work of Ockham himself. Those who are nominalists in this sense reject a Platonistic or realistic interpretation of discourse about things as diverse as properties, kinds, relations, propositions, sets, states of affairs and modality. Sometimes the nominalist is said to endorse the view that discourse of the sort in question is metalinguistic and that talk about the so-called abstract entities is really just talk about nomina or linguistic expressions. Characterized in this way, nominalism is sometimes said to stand opposed to conceptualism, another reductionist approach to ontological questions about abstract entities. The claim is that while the conceptualist insists that it is necessary to make reference to the activity of conceptual representation to accommodate the recalcitrant discourse, the nominalist denies this. But, first, not all of those who are called nominalists endorse a metalinguistic interpretation of the disputed discourse; and, second, since few philosophers have thought it possible to characterize language without referring to conceptual activity, to take nominalism as a view opposed to conceptualism yields the result that few of those thinkers normally taken to be nominalists turn out to deserve that label. Accordingly, it has become customary to construe as nominalistic any reductive approach to ontological questions about abstract entities that stands opposed to the Platonistic view.