At 08:58 PM 9/29/2014, Clark Goble wrote:
HP: To get a fairer picture of how physicists think, please peruse this survey.
CG: I'd seen that before. While it's a great guide to interpretations of quantum mechanics it really doesn't address the nominalism issue.
HP: I'm curious how you would state the nominalism issue? In my view, in at least half the questions the answers imply a pro- or anti-nominalistic stance (Questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15).
The realism-nominalism issue is a complex one with both a traditional form (pre-logicism) and a more contemporary form, championed by Goodman and Quine, originally, in this century. On the traditional view concepts are constructions of our minds, and everything that exists is a particular, and all that is real is what exists (I add the last to accommodate Peirce). It is typically associated with some form of materialism or physicalism, but Peirce also applies the notion to some idealists, arguing that their generals are not real in his sense. I will leave that aside. Proponents are Locke, Hume, Reid and the British Empiricists in general.
The more contemporary nominalism is based in a view of language and thought (which is understood on a linguistic model), and pays special attention to what we can sense. Quine, for example, calls himself a physicalist because he believes that our knowledge comes from the senses, which are physical (as a pragmatist, he shares this with Peirce, except Peirce regards them as external, not physical, but that might be only a difference in terminology). Quine and Goodman believe that there are no propositions, only instances of sentences or statements, and these are related not by identity of some sort (being of the identical kind) but just by being similar. From this and the grounding of knowledge in the senses Quine argues that meaning must be limited to what he calls the "ersatz" version such that dispositions to assent alone determine meaning, and that translation is multiply ambiguous, even for our own language onto itself. The only meaning that remains is what withstands this transformation, but he agrees that this is not what we usually call meaning. Followers have argued that this makes truth either trivial (Paul Horwich, Huw Price), or dispensable, with assent being all that matters (Richard Rorty). This differs from the traditional view, since it accepts the existence of external objects in a well-defined way, and even having an individual essence that is real (Locke, though he thought that language usually followed the nominal essence -- for Quine this is the only way possible). For Goodman the big issue is what sort of similarity matters. He points out that all evidence that we have of emeralds is compatible both with the projection that emeralds are blue until the are observed and green afterwards (I am simplifying), so both ways of projecting "all emeralds are green" and "all emeralds are blue until observed and then they are green" are equally compatible with all evidence, so we have no evidence basis for choosing one or the other generalization. Note that this may seem odd, but it is a consequence of assuming t5hat we o0nly observe particulars and any generals are ones we freely make up. The big issue for the contemporary nominalist, as Russell pointed out, is whether similarity is sufficient first of all, and second, whether it works. He argued that similarity, to work, must be a universal, so the nominalist project, clever though it is, falls apart from the get go. He then argues that once you accept this argument, that it is obvious that similarity is not sufficient, since it raise the question, similarity of what? Everything is similar to everything else in some respect, so we need respects. (I read this argument in a mimeographed paper of Russell's at UCLA, and I am not sure that it was ever published.)
The reason why I go into this is that it has some bearing on how to evaluate all of the questions. I think that it is a given that for any realist position there is a nominalist position in the contemporary sense that can fit the same assent structure. Typically one is realist about some things, but not others (for example one can be a realist about physical laws but not numbers, or vice versa). So contemporary nominalism, if it works at all, will work for all claims of reality involving a specific external existence.
This isn't so for traditional nominalism, since they assume the existence external conditions that make claims about particulars, at least, true. Similarity is likewise and external condition.
I think that many of the questions can be seen as about objective projections by induction that would be acceptable to the traditional nominalist who believes that everything that exists is a particular. This view can be called (and is) scientific realism about the entities science proposes. So I think the answers to many of the questions fits realism of the scientific sort, that is acceptable even to nominalists of the Lockean sort.
Question 1, for example, gives positive answers to the irreducibility of randomness and its being a fundamental concept. The second answer is committed to scientific realism about randomness, and seems to be committed to the reality of the concept, which would not be nominalist. The lower rate for claims of the irreducibility of randomness, though, suggests that the concepts for some of the positive responders to (d) think the concept is reducible to something else, which suggests it not fundamental in the sense of being something real in itself.
I could go on to others, but I hope you get the idea. The answers make it very hard to detect even scientific realism about the properties, let alone metaphysical realism (belief in the reality of generals). Randomness, for example, though fundamental, could be fundamental in each instance, the instances being similar, which is compatible with the traditional nominalist position. For the modern nominalist, it is just a way in which we choose to talk.
I think that Question 9 is special because it asks specifically for ontological commitment. Still, it doesn't decide between scientific and metaphysical realism, and at least some of the responders seem to be metaphysically confused.
I hope this is reasonably clear.
John
John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
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