Agreed. This nominalism fits into, at least in the early centuries, the
political and economic need of 'civic man' [i.e., the ordinary
man-of-the-work force rather than the intelligentsia of the church and
nobles]...to gain the right to interact with the objective world, one-on-one
so to speak.
It was rapidly taken over by the intellectuals who moved its focus on the
individual into postmodern relativism. That's where Saussure's semiology is
dominant in endless explanations that 'this image' really has 'that
meaning'.
But I think one has to be careful of one's approach to realism as well,
where one can ignore the evolutionary nature of Peircean Thirdness [which
posits that the laws are real but are not 'a priori' but are dynamic and
emerge and adapt with the organisms]. A dangerous slip in thinking means
that one will instead move into a kind of theistic a priori
essentialism...which is what the nominalists were fighting against when they
threw out 'the baby with the bathwater' so to speak. In this case, the laws
become rigid and necessary and in an interesting sense, alienated from the
matter/organism's existentiality. That's not Peircean Thirdness; it can be
idealism; it can be theism.
Edwina
Edwina
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: "John F Sowa" <s...@bestweb.net>
To: <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 10:55 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] nominalism
On 1/24/2017 6:33 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
Essentially, nominalism denies universals or common attributes have
reality in themselves; it considers them to be mere terms created
by man for these 'commonalities'.
Yes. And one of the worst examples is its treatment of the laws
of science. Rudolf Carnap, for example, had studied physics, and
he taught a course on the philosophy of science for many years.
In it, he repeated Ernst Mach's claim that the "laws of physics"
are merely "summaries of data".
Martin Gardner, who took Carnap's course at the U. of Chicago,
organized his notes in book form and got Carnap's permission,
comments, revisions, and approval to publish it. It explicitly
states that the laws of science are "summaries of data".
Carnap, Rudolf (1966) An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science,
edited by Martin Gardner, New York: Dover.
Einstein denounced the "Angst vor der Metaphysik" of Mach, Russell,
and the logical positivists. He called Mach "a good experimental
physicist, but a miserable philosopher". He admitted that Mach's
emphasis on experiment and observation was important. But the idea
of observation led Einstein to his Gedanken experiments, which were
a brilliant *perversion* of Mach.
Peirce would have been delighted with Einstein's Gedanken experiments
because they are a further development of his ideas about diagrammatic
reasoning.
See the quotation below. In writing that, Peirce was thinking about
David Hume and "advanced thinkers of the present day" (1894), such
as Ernst Mach and Karl Pearson. In his _Grammar of Science_ (1892)
Pearson said "science is in reality a classification and analysis
of the contents of the mind... In truth, the field of science is
much more consciousness than an external world."
John
_______________________________________________________________________
From CP 1.129
Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics
-- not by any means every man who holds the ordinary reasonings of
metaphysicians in scorn -- and you have found one whose doctrines are
thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with
which they are packed.
We must philosophize, said the great naturalist Aristotle -- if only
to avoid philosophizing. Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has
to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better,
then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed
to run loose.
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