RP:
'One,' or '1' does not seem to be the sort of 'name' which 'locates something,' although I can see how a Formalist it might, so I'll have to think about this.
Man, I'm so glad I don't have to. Thank you, RP.
Mike Geary trying to figure out how I underbid yet another job -- jesus!!
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.
Did I say this was a kind of nominalism? If I did, so what? I have no idea what the expression 'name as a part of practice' means. On my view, nominalism simply picks out kinds of things (practices no doubt among them) without trying to give essential definitions of the kinds of things picked out. There is, I grant, a certain amount of intuition involved in selecting the kinds of things (or practices or ideologies) picked out, but we don't, at least, think that small irridescent beetles are instances of fairness. 'These and similar things are called "tools",' strikes me as a tacit appeal to nominalism.
There is a robust tradition of nominalism in mathematics e.g. Formalism, in which—in its extreme version—numbers are treated as marks on paper, which are manipulated according to certain rules. (This is the view that Frege demolishes.) 'One,' or '1' does not seem to be the sort of 'name' which 'locates something,' although I can see how a Formalist it might, so I'll have to think about this.
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
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