Phil Enns wrote:
Robert Paul wrote:
"We can easily give examples of fair and unfair practices, without believing that fairness itself is somehow an independently existing 'thing.'"
What makes this a kind of nominalism? Perhaps one could call it a kind of pragmatism, but nominalism seems to be a stretch. After all, what matters here is not one's ability to locate what a word 'names' but one's ability to locate the practice within which the name has its meaning established. There seems to be an important difference between 'name as that which locates something', what I understand to be the classic definition of nominalism, and 'name as part of practice'. Perhaps this is a contemporary form of nominalism that I am not aware of, but it seems a very different thing from what one finds in classic nominalists such as Ockham.
Robert Paul Reed College ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html