Charles, list,I think that it will be quite difiicult to deduce practical implications from the ideas of nominalism and realism as bare isms. Even the laws of mechanics require application to examples in order to be understood. Society is not only complex but complexly reflexive, with a kind of metabolism of "meta" levels thematized in various and sometimes disparate ways and factoring into the society's practical workings. Society is full of "folk sociology" among other things, and has to be. Human history is a subject about as abductive and full of guessing and conjecture as there is, especially as it is about _/homo abducens/_. Society itself is tainted with ideas downright false, thus with generals and individuals that alike are downright figments; society itself takes on some aspects of the figmentitious. It will be difficult for us as thinkers to out-think the totality of thinkers constituting an actual society. If you desire to deduce their sociological practical implications, you'll need to look at nominalism and realism in combination with other ideas, with various social conditions, and so on. Since nominalism and realism already have a history in our society, it will be difficult to steadfastly ignore that history in deducing such practical implications. The bare ideas of nominalism and realism have no more simple definite meaning as factors in practical society than do the ideas of the normal distribution, conditional probabilities, or Pascal's triangle, although those three ideas, involving measure and counting, seem more practical than do philosophical isms, which are about putting our ideas in order, inferential order in particular. The apple pickers probably care at least about real rules of counting apples or estimating amount of work done. An apple-picker who regards such rules as arbitrary and fictitious will come to be regarded as a pathological liar, or somebody who just doesn't get the idea of truth. To regard every social rule as purely an arbitrary convention with no general justification implies arbitrarily obeying — or arbitrarily disobeying — an arbitrary authority. There are many ways in which it could go. Most nominalists don't _/actually/_ go those ways. Some prefer nominalist talk because, as philosophy goes, it seems to them less pseudo-scientific than other philosophical schools of talk. Most philosophical efforts at scientific respectability seem to fail anyway these days. Sometimes it seems to come down to a tug-of-war over the word "real." If a supposed nominalist grants that sufficient inquiries will converge to agreement about laws of physics, but just wants to reserve the word "real" for individual concrete events or objects, then it's an argument over words, and Peirce sometimes justifies his use of the term "real" with an account of the history of the term "real" in philosophy, in which it had a meaning that is much like that in everyday English as opposed to much recent philosophy. But some nominalists, e.g., Mach, really do want to avoid the idea of real generals, whatever they're called. With realism we avoid a lot of euphemisms such as "summaries of facts" and "regularities" of determinate collections of designated objects, euphemisms whereby we _/use/_ seriously, but don't _/mention/_ in all seriousness, the generals which indeed interest us for being projectable beyond known deteminate collections and in which we often trust in practical matters. Peirce in one of his lectures held an object in his hand and asked the audience what_ /would/_ happen if he _/were/_ to release that object. A practical implication of nominalism is the denial of the reality of things that most researchers care about, and ought to care about, in practice.
Best, Ben On 2/6/2017 1:09 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
Ben,There was an attempt, on the earlier thread I initiated, to provide an example similar to your east-west divide of the apple field. There, as now, I'm not convinced that being a nominalist or realist would adhere one to a particular sense of right or wrong in such a case. I would imagine it was relatively trivial to argue in favor of, or against, dividing the field in such a way, from either side, if your unrelated biases predisposed you one way or the other.I could, as a nominalist, insist that though the division be an arbitrary convention, we follow the rule none the less. I also could insist, as a realist, that east-west is far more than a /mere/ convention of language, and explain the logic of using it as a criteria.Similarly I could, as a nominalist, insist that the arbitrary convention of east-west have no hold over my ability to pick apples where I please. I could also insist, as a realist, that east-west, while having a local relative meaning has no global meaning that would allow it to serve as a useful arbiter in this case.Etc., etc.Whether or not 'generals' are 'real' doesn't necessitate my using - or rejecting the use of - those concepts in such an abstracted example. Or, to phrase it differently, whether I suspect that, in the end times, the opinion of honest investigators will allow for 'east' and 'west', doesn't matter a lick to how divide up the field right now. This is similar to the how we can have fruitful discussions about the impact of race in America, and solutions to the problems race-based thinking has caused, all while also acknowledging that 'race' is a BS concept, which is likely to be done away with by honest inquirers long before the end times are here.If you think that being a nominalist is likely to correspond to certain other tendencies, based on your observations of the distribution of ideas we happen to see in current society, that is another matter all together. Such matters are not logical consequences of adopting one view or the other, they are happenstance correlates, and so (as far as I understand it) would not count for Peirce's pragmatic maxim.----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Supervisory Survey Statistician U.S. Marine CorpsOn Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 11:48 AM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:Eric, Jon S., list, I don't think that the nominalist and realist views are symmetrical as you suggest with regard to generals and individuals. A Peircean realist will say that individuals have some generality but still can only be in one place at a time, unlike "more-general" generals, and would never say that every term designating an individual is a mere _/flatus vocis/_ as many a nominalist has called every general term. The individual in Peirce's view is not a mere construct but instead is forced indexically on a mind by reaction and resistance. Peirce somewhere also says that a universe of discourse is likewise distinguished indexically. For Peirce, the individual is the reactive/resistant, and reaction/resistance is Secondness, a basic phaneroscopic category. Let's bring into your apple-picker scenario some non-extraneous generals that would make a difference between the two apple pickers. For example, they get into an argument about which apples each of them is allowed to pick. Apple picker Alf says that he's allowed to pick any apples only in the eastern area and that apple picker Beth is allowed to pick any apples only in the western area, while Beth says that each of them should be able to pick any apples anywhere in the area. Alf says that the rules prescribe the east-west split, while Beth says that those rules are unfair and should be ignored or evaded. Alf says not that the rules are fair but instead that there is no such thing as "fair" apart from what the rules state in individual documents or announcements. Beth doesn't expound a full-blown doctrine of either natural law or revolutionary justice, but simply insists, "fair is fair." I won't say that Alf is a strict nominalist and Beth a strict scholastic realist, but just that they tend respectively toward nominalism (Alf) and realism (Beth). At their respective worsts, Alf promotes conformity with a cruel and unjust regime, while Beth promotes the breakdown of the rule of law. Alf's attitude is more congenial to the idea that there is no idea of fairness above that of the state. On the other hand, some nominalists would argue that nominalism and the more-nominalistic brands of positivism are at least a good holding action against the militant ideas that contributed to the vast bloodshed in the 20th Century. My picture doesn't quite converge with Edwina's picture but I don't mean to deny her picture either. Nominalism and realism are pretty general ideas that could get rooted in practice in disparate ways. I once read a web page where somebody argued that HTML markup that complies with official, explicit HTML standards is right "by definition." This was as if the standards themselves had not been devised according to some more general and probably less definite idea of what standards should be like and as if there could be no idea of HTML rightness that would require the revision of the official, explicit standards promulgated on individual dates in specific documents by the World Wide Web Consortium. Now, for a while the Mozilla Firefox browser adhered to the standards in certain cases where the standards were problematic. I don't think that the Firefox designers denied the need for revised standards, based on a more general idea of standards, but they didn't like the idea of rebellion by browser designers (such rebellion does make it more difficult to design web pages that work in all browsers). But they took this "letter of the law" attitude to an extreme. (I'm thinking in particular of how Firefox treated two or more directly successive hyphens in a hidden comment - IIRC, it treated them as a hidden comment's closing tag (except the double hyphen in the opening tag), whereas other browsers and most webpage designers treated -->, a double hyphen followed directly by a greater-than sign, as the one and only way to do a hidden comment's closing tag. For a while I found myself deleting or replacing with equals-signs many strings of hyphens that Joe Ransdell had placed between hidden-comment tags at Arisbe. Anyway, Mozilla finally gave in and said something like "We don't have to change our browser for this, but we will.") Best, Ben On 2/6/2017 9:58 AM, Eric Charles wrote:JS said: In other words, the nominalist says that reality consists entirely of individuals, so generals are only names we use to facilitate discourse; while the (Peircean) realist says that reality consists entirely of generals, so individuals are only names we use to facilitate discourse. If so, how does this help answer Eric's original question about the practical differences that one view manifests relative to the other? Uh oh. I was rather satisfied with having decided, aided by the list discussion, that - from a pragmatist perspective - nominalists were /just/ people who denied that collective inquiry into categories leads to convergence of ideas. But now (here and elsewhere) Nominalists are again being attributed more positive beliefs, and my original question resurfaces: What difference does it make? That is, what distinction-of-consequences allows us to consider the ideas to be different. This seems like the context in which parables are helpful. ----- Imagine if you will, two apple pickers. They both pick apples, fill baskets, and deliver the baskets to the back of nearby trucks. At the end of the day, they get paid based on the number of baskets they deliver to the truck. "Look at how similar those two are," you say to yourself one day while watching them. "Heck no," someone next to you says, and you realize you must have been speaking your thoughts. You look inquisitively at the interlocutor, and he continues. "I've known those two my entire life, and they couldn't be more different. One is a nominalist, and the other is a Peircian realist." You continue to look inquisitively, and the stranger goes on. "You see, Bill, on the left there, he doesn't believe that categories or generalities like 'apple' exist at all. He conceives of himself as picking up distinctly individual objects, and collecting them into baskets, with each basket being distinct in every way from the next basket. He sometimes points out, for example, that the 'red' color is not identical between any two picked-objects, and that any two containers of picked-objects are mind bogglingly different at an atomic level. The whole notion that he is collecting 'apples' into 'baskets' that have any equivalence at all is /just/ , he insists, a weird language game we have agreed to play, and doesn't correspond at all with reality." After that barrage of ideas, the man settles into silence, watching the pickers. "... and?..." you ply. "Well, you see," he continued, after some thought, "in contrast, Jim, over there on the right, believes that only generals are real, and the idea that these apples are individuals is the flaw in our thinking. After all, what makes 'that apple' any less misleading than any other label of individuality. What about 'that apple' will be the same when it gets to the store shelf? Heck, he would even claim that it is odd to believe that Bill-on-the-left is the same person he was a year ago. Bill-on-the-left has the properties of being a singular thing, but the identity label itself is just convenient ways to refer to complex composite beings, and don't get at any sort of 'essence' at all. Those individual names are /just/ , he insist, a weird linguistic device to facilitate discourse. Quite to the contrary, Jim would insist, if there is anything going on here that honest inquirers would agree about after the dust settles, it is that 'apples' were put in 'baskets', and that makes those generals real." "Huh," you insist, "that is all very fascinating, but I can detect no difference in their behavior that would correspond to such a dramatic seeming difference in thinking. Do they not both pick, and bucket, and deliver in the same manner? And wait in the same line, in the same way, to receive the same pay, with the same sullenness?" "Well yes," says the stranger, "but trust me, they are very, very different. As I said, one is a nominalist, and the other a realist in the pragmatic vein. Men with such contrasting sets of ideas couldn't be more different." "Huh," you repeat, "aside from the words and phrases they would invoke in a conversation about the specific topic you brought up, what conditions could we arrange so as to see the difference in belief manifest as clear differences in behavior? (Granting probability, and all that.) " "Well, you couldn't," says the stranger, "they are differences in belief, not differences in habit." "Ah," you reply confidently, "it is too bad your thinking is not as clear as mine. Belief is habit. As such, if there is no difference in habit between the two that would - granted probability, and all that - manifest itself under some arranged circumstances, then the two beliefs are equivalent, no matter what the words might mislead you into thinking. Thus, if you don't mind, I'll continue to think that the two people are very similar." Another long pause ensued, and the man offered, sounding less certain, "Well, I suppose they would relatively-reflexively complain differently, under circumstances we could arrange, and those differences-in-verbal-complaint would be logically connected with the distinction I have pointed out." "Ah," you reply again, "I suppose that might indeed count as a habit-of-thought, or something like that. But I already mentioned that I am concerned with the ideas, not the words used to express the ideas. And even if I were to allow mere differences in verbal responses, which I am not sure I am terribly inclined to do, that would surely be amongst the least of differences worth considering, and so I will still - thank you very much - view them as quite similar. Good day." ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Supervisory Survey Statistician U.S. Marine Corps On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 12:36 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
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