Helmut - further to your post, where you write "if you believe that the universe itself is an organism (pantheism) or part of an organism (panentheism), then nominalism would make sense?"
I'd say 'no' to that. I, myself, consider that the universe is an organism, a massive operation of 'Mind', but that's not nominalism. Again, as Peirce pointed out in 1.16 - the question is, 'whether laws and general types are figments of the mind or real". As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Saussurian semiology is an example of a perspective that considers that general types are mental concepts. That is, since nominalism is expressed in symbols/words, then, information becomes almost entirely operative in the human realm. Plants, animals, cells, molecules..become inanimate or dumb matter. And further, as Peirce noted, the great era of nominalism emerged in the 14th century, with the rise of the battle against the control of thought by the Church. That is, with the emergence of a market economy and middle class, the civic individual, i.e., the non-clerical working man, began to require the political and economic right to individually and personally 'handle' the environment. This 'handling' was all about 'the being of individual thing or fact' [1.21]. This new age man was not interested in the amorphousness of general laws outside of his direct actual grasp and personal perception. Thus, the world of nominalism reduces everything to only one mode of being; that of Secondness, or existent particular objects. It ignores Firstness, that mode of being of isolate free possibility - or, if it acknowledges it, it is to transform this mode into an 'unconscious' psychological feeling within that new age man..which can then be brought into the consciousness by ..guess what...by words. And most certainly, nominalism rejects Thirdness, the mode of being made up of general laws - since, for the nominalist, laws are not real in themselves but are intellectual constructs of the human mind...."this general rule is nothing but a mere word or couple of words" [1.26]. When we reject nominalism for its obvious limitations, I think that we have to be careful with analyzing the two modal categories absent in nominalism; Firstness and Thirdness. These are modes of being, actual means of organizing matter, and can't be reduced to terms or words. Edwina
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