> On Jan 29, 2017, at 12:57 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > I would not call it a "force," but I agree that the traditional debate is > about whether there is something real (hence "realism") that all rabbits have > in common to make them rabbits vs. "rabbits" merely being a name (hence > "nominalism") that we apply to many different individuals simply because we > happen to perceive them as having certain similarities. Even this way of > putting it arguably concedes too much to nominalism, because it implies that > the universal or general is a thing that is somehow identically instantiated > in multiple other things. >
A good place where this debate appears is thermodynamics. It’s fairly well known that defining a system with spatially extended objects with various symmetries allows one to define the laws of thermodynamics. Now this is a very nominalist conception of thermodynamics yet importantly it is one where the laws arise out of the symmetries of matter. So you don’t need the idea of laws logically prior to the objects to make sense of them. Just properties inherent to the objects. (There’d still be an ontological question about some of these properties like overlap and interactions of course — but in theory you could argue they inhere to the objects rather than are independent of them) Peirce’s solution really is to argue that symmetries are themselves real independent of the objects. Now this won’t work for foundational physics due to the crazy nature of quantum mechanics. It’s much harder (IMO) to formulate a quantum mechanics in terms of nominalism. People still try to do it of course, but it’s usually via a ontological slight of hand where the foundational laws place isn’t dealt with. You can see that slight of hand in say New Atheist arguments about why there is something rather than nothing. The foundational laws of physics are always part of this ‘before’ yet not seen as ‘something.’ Effectively they need a real lawlike prescriptive feature of the universe prior to there being an universe. Really this has the role God does for deists and the distinction between a deist and an atheist blurs at best. Of course this was common even in early modernism where extreme nominalists still put God into the picture. Effectively a big reason why realism was a thing before was theology (whether pagan for the neoplatonists or in the medieval era and renaissance God for the Christians, Jews and Muslims and even for deists) So nominalism was a slow development partially done as science became independent from religion. After Newton it became possible to really conceive of all of reality in terms of deterministic atom and a few laws so nominalism took off and became the mainstream intellectual view.
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