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.
