Thank you, Edwina (and you all, Jon, John...). I understood that Nominalism means to reduce (or upduce?) everything to a symbol of a secondness, a language that adresses brute facts. So bio- and physicochemical semiotics are ignored, as there is no symbolic language. Only humans have languages, so now Nominalism for me appears to be human hybris. Is the linguistic turn also nominalistic? I guess so. Maybe my tentative attempt to rescue Nominalism by extending the "mind"-concept towards the universe´s mind is anthropocentric: It would mean, that possibility, firstness, is not real by itself, but consists of symbols of secondnesses: That would be Platonism, I guess: To say, that something, an organism, a repeated situation, whatever, does not occur because it was possible (firstness), and then became a habit (thirdness), but is only a copy or token of a divine or super-divine (in polytheism) idea. To me it boils down to the question we have had, what was in the beginning: Tohuvabohu, everything was possible, then possibility was not ideas, but everything (in a pre-world in which "everything is possible" possibility is everything). Or was there "nothing" in the beginning: In this case possibilities are ideas, planted into the nothing (by whom or what, Mr. Plato?), like in Platonism. I tend towards the Tohuvabohu-Hypothesis, and against Nominalism. My tentative attempt (to rescue Nominalism on the basis of universal mind) has failed, and I am happy about that.
Best,
Helmut
24. Januar 2017 um 16:07 Uhr
"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
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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