> On Jan 27, 2017, at 4:19 PM, Eric Charles <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I must admit that I find much of the recent discussion baffling. In part, > this is because I have never had anyone explain the Nominalism-Realism > distinction in a way that made sense to me. Don't get me wrong, I think I > understand the argument in the ancient context. However, one of the biggest > appeals of American Philosophy, for me, is its ability to eliminate (or > disarm) longstanding philosophical problems.
Coming late to the discussion after being out of town for several days. As I said last week I’m not convinced for most questions the nominalist vs. realist distinction really matters that much. But then it’s debatable how much philosophy really matters in practical terms - that’s especially true of metaphysical questions. That said, the realist vs. nominalist distinction ultimately is a distinction of whether a property or structure depends upon how humans think about it. There are practical implications of this since if it does depend upon humans one might argue the construction is open to modification. This doesn’t follow naturally of course - there may be innate structures of thought due to our biology but in practice many people think if it could be thought differently we can engineer how people think about it. Where you see this happening is in the nominalistic types of continental philosophy where construction entails reconstruction often along political grounds. Foucault (the 20th century one) is a great example of that. In American academics you see this with gender theory, feminist theory, and intersectionality which are often explicitly tied to many structures being constructed and thus open to political reconstruction. One should note that the realist/anti-realist question when tied to particular entities is a bit different from the more broad debate. The former is arguments about things like whether mathematics is a human construct or whether gender is. One might think one is constructed (say gender) but not others (say mathematics). The broader question is simply whether any generality can be real or if only particular (typically spatio-temporal) entities are real. While the broad question can and does have implications for more narrow questions, technically one can argue one without taking a position on the other. In the early 20th century, largely due to the influence of Hegel but also to a degree Frege there was a big debate between idealists and scientific realists over this topic. By the war this had largely died out although you can see questions about foundations of mathematics and even the demarcation problem of science as remnants of that debate. The pragmatists (primarily Dewey although also Peirce even though he wasn’t as well known) offered a third way between the poles of idealism and scientific realism (largely a convergence theory of realism). Sadly though this didn’t really catch on well. When there was a rebirth of pragmatism with Putnam and Rorty both tended to avoid the pragmatist solutions for various reasons.
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